Accessibility Testers Needed - Web Site and Flutter Installer

Community Ways to contribute
#1

Ubuntu should be available to everyone - and accessible to everyone. We know that we’ve slipped on this, and haven’t prioritized accessibility the way we should. We want to find where the need for improvement is greatest and begin there - but we definitely don’t want to stop there.

There are two areas right now where Canonical employees could use the help of contributors who use screen readers:

  • helping one of our Web and Design Engineers @sowasred2012 with changes and updates to the website
  • helping our head of Desktop @kenvandine test the Flutter installer for accessibility with screen readers

If you use a screen reader or if you face other accessibility challenges and would like to contribute in either of these areas, and possibly keep testing in the future, please reply to this thread and let us know. Scott and Ken can also provide more details on their testing if you have questions. Thank you and we hope this is just the start of a good partnership with our volunteer community to make Ubuntu truly available to all people.

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#2

I would definitely like to be more involve. I’ve been using Linux since 1991 and seen a lot of change. I started using Ubuntu around 2010 as I wanted a no fuss desktop at the time. I started losing the remainder of my sight around 2014 and got a serious crash course in accessibility on Linux. I loved Ubuntu 14/16 but the distro got harder and harder to use as the releases progressed due to the breakages. I’ve had to switch to Windows to get a usable system again but I still keep trying.

So, I definitely want to help as it is frustrating to see Apple leading accessibility when OSS could blow it out of the park IMHO.

2 Likes
#3

Hi,
I leave in quebec and I have a project that I give computer to blind that don’t have the possibility to pai one. I’m interested to test the new installer and the desktop for accessibility purpose. I’m blind and I use ubuntu every day with orca and I install ubuntu on the computers that I give.

3 Likes
#4

@dminer and @alpha2018ca thank you so much for joining the community here on Discourse. I completely agree that OSS should be so much more accessible, and increased testing is only going to help. And @alpha2018ca I love how you help people who need computers get them, and I hope testing the installer helps your project too!

This week is release week, so the desktop team is incredibly busy, but they’ve been reading this thread and the thread on the orca testers list, and hopefully will join the discussion soon to find out how Canonical can help.

3 Likes
#5

Hi all,

I am also very interested to be an accessibility tester for Ubuntu to get the OS more accessible. I am a blind programmer, a master student in computer science, and I love Linux in general, and Ubuntu in particular for programming because it feels like a haven for those purposes.

3 Likes
#6

Hi, I am blind and helping sighted people to use Ubuntu. I install Ubuntu on refurbished hardware. So it is very important the installer keeps accessible with Orca screen reader.

1 Like