Foss And Disabled Users

From HudLUG

Open Letter: how the FOSS community may help disabled users

by Marco Fioretti, mfioretti, @, mclink.it

I rencently wrote an article about the serious communication problems between the Free/Open Source Software (FOSS) community and disabled users. I have asked to the Huddersfield Linux Users Group to publish this open letter on the same subject because I have no permanent web address right now where it could be posted, and because I wanted to draw attention to the excellent job they are doing in this field.

My article has been both attacked and praised on many mailing lists. It has also been criticized on Groklaw, because I would be out of the loop and discussed on Slashdot. I have a few quick comments about this, and above all a proposal for all FOSS supporters worldwide.

First of all, the world is much' bigger than Massachusetts, or USA for that matter. The stories I reported show that it is the majority of disabled people to still be, or be left, out of the loop. This is also proved by other stories from disabled users.

Second, I explicitly criticized the attitude of the FOSS community. Not the current corporate efforts to make FOSS or OpenDocument accessible. Of course, there are some wonderful exceptions and the Huddersfield LUG is one of them. But the many, er, "aristocratic" comments on Slashdot and elsewhere just prove I was right, and that when FOSS will become accessible, it probably won't be thanks to some wonderful "community" of users.

Third, any variant of "we don't owe anything to disabled users, if they want FOSS to work for them they should contribute real money or code" is technically right, but could quickly make FOSS irrelevant. Accessibility is (rightly) mandatory in government contracts.

Now comes the proposal. Less than one day later the article had been published, my mailbox was already full of excellent, articulated proofs that FOSS, OpenDocument and open standards are the best thing that could ever happen to disabled users. Thanks, but unfortunately all these proofs contain two mistakes.

The first is that you are really wasting your time explaining all this to me. I already know it. I agree with you. In my article, I already criticized disabled users for not paying enough attention for the limitations to their rights caused by proprietary software and formats. So tell all this to the right people. Go to them, and work with them, just like, as I discovered thanks to my article, the members of the Huddersfield LUG are already doing. Make their work the rule, not the exception.

December 3rd is the UN International Day of Disabled Persons: I friendly challenge all FOSS advocates to act to narrow this gap. Free SW is too important to exclude anybody. Get out in the streets, find the closest association of disabled users and do something FOSSy together, not later that that day: talks, dedicated install fests, whatever... Just act (and of course let me know!), but please avoid the second mistake: don't use the same arguments and language normally used among programmers. They're correct, but remember that most human beings (disabled or not) would rather take laxatives than touch source code, and nobody should treat them as inferior people for this.

Thanks for your time and your help,

Marco Fioretti

2006/04/11