Re: [Audio-video] http://audio-video.gnu.org/video/ghm2013/Samuel_Thibault_Jean-Philippe_Mengual-Freedom_0_for_everybody_really_.text

[Samuel Thibault]

Hello Richard,

There is one important thing to point out here:

Richard Stallman, le Sat 19 Jul 2014 21:11:22 -0400, a écrit :
> I think the government should spend our money on work to make things
> easier for blind people.  This can include improving free software for
> the sake of blind users.

No, it can not work that way.

Accessibility is not just a matter of patching over the software.  Doing
it that way is unproductive at best: one would have to continuously
send patches to free software as they are created and developped, and
accessibility will thus always lag behind.  And it's often not even just
a patch: quite often some software is not accessible because from the
ground it was not properly designed, so fixing it is not just a matter
of an additional feature, it requires rethinking the structure of the
software.  And there is no way for anybody (be a government or whatever)
to have the money to manage to follow and patch all free software in the
world...

For accessibility to actually work, the workload has to be borne by the
upstream authors themselves.  It happens that it's not difficult when
it's done *at that level*.  It is first a matter of making sure that the
toolkit one uses is accessible, and then a matter of using it properly
(exposing relations between widgets, etc.).  It thus actually usually
boils down to good programming practices, not much more...

> But your blindness does not make you ethically entitled to order a
> specific person do specific work to help you out.

Well, I wouldn't say "order", but quite close.

Take the example of a social network.  Not being able to access it means
being excluded from everything that happens there.  More generally, when
one creates something which not everybody can access, it means excluding
people.  That's ethically questionable.

>     3. You are afraid, when you hear "Freedom 0 could ship accessibility", 
> 
> What you have said is, "Accessibility is a part of freedom 0."  That
> is a dreadful mistake and compels me to oppose your activities.

I agree that we shouldn't say that accessibility is part of freedom 0 as
you defined it.

Can we instead say for instance that freedom 0 is useless without
accessibility?

With best regards,
Samuel