* John G. Heim jheim@math.wisc.edu [111102 17:24]:
From: "Christian Hofstaedtler" ch@grml.org To: grml@ml.grml.org
speakup kernel modules and espeakup have already been removed in the daily builds; they will not make it into the next release.
Okay, now I'm unclear as to why this is. The original post said the grml developers don't want to do anything half baked. But including speakup & espeak isn't doing it half baked. That's just mainstream. You don't need to do anything fancy anymore to provide accessibility.
The speakup kernel modules are indeed not mainstream; we have to build them separately from the main kernel. We're currently looking to remove all external modules, if possible.
I mean, I can see dropping that script you used to supply that started software speech. I could never remember what to type so I always just started speech myself at the command line.
It also needs space on the ISOs. Every release the ISOs grow larger and we have to drop stuff. Besides that we also have to do testing and/or deal with bug reports, etc. If there's a problem in unstable with this software, we'd also have to deal with that (uninstallable or something).
Maybe the grml developers are under the impression that blind people don't use grml. I don't think that's true. In fact, there seems to be several of us blind people on this list. For every one of us, there are probably dozens or hundreds of others.
We don't think nobody uses this. On the other hand we clearly see that none of the developers has personal use for accessibility, and we do not receive contributions (development and QA) from this user group.
-ch