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Jonathan: Hello, welcome, thank you for joining us on This Week In Debian. Today
we have an exciting interview, we're speaking with Samuel Thibault, who's on the
Accessibility Team of Debian.  Samuel, thank you for joining us today.

Samuel: Thanks for inviting.

J: Oh, no problem. Samuel, first thing I like to ask everyone that we interview
is "how did you first get involved into Linux ?"

S: Oh, to Linux, err, that's a long time ago [giggles].  It was a friend of mine
who discovered some CD in some magasine somewhere, there wasn't Internet at the
time in our village, and so we tried it and found that there was the source code
and so we could learn about things in that, and learn how hardware would work,
etc. so we got interested and we continued that way since 15 or 20 years.

J: Wow. What was the first Linux distro that you used, was it RedHat I'm
asuming, or Slackware?

S: That was the Slackware, yes, then we also tried the RedHat, and there was a
Kheops distro as well, and Mandriva after that [Hum].  But now I'm mostly into
Debian of course.

J: What country are you in right now?

S: I'm in France right now.

J: OK, what's OpenSource and Linux like in your area of France, do a lot of
people know what Linux is, do other people use it, or not use it, what is it
like over there?

S: Actually, in the University here in Bordeaux, we actually do provide only
Linux computers to the students [Really?] Yes, there are a couple of windows
rooms for people who really want it, but there are just a few, and all our
computer scientists only use Linux for their projects etc. [Oh, awsome] Yes,
they do know a lot about this, and there are a lot of activists in libre
software who reside in Bordeaux, so yes, there is a strong community here.

J: I know Zack, the Debian Project Leader, is in France, in a school there, are
you relatively close to him, do you speak with him a lot, or?

S: Actually, there are a lot of people which I just discovered that they were
close to me that... I don't have contact with them, I don't know where they are.
[laughs]

J: So, back to Debian, how did you discover Linux and started using it: how did
you discover Debian and get involved in the Debian community?

S: Err, that was quite a long process in that I tried using Mandriva as I
said, and there were a lot of things I wanted to tinker, it was more and more
difficult to do this, and then somebody gave me a CD of Debian, telling me
"well, try this", and I found that it was really great to tinker, to
parameterize everything the way I wanted. And when I joined the University, just
after what we call "Bacalauréat" in France, I had an Internet connection, so I
could start really joining the Debian community in submitting bugs, submitting
patches, and progressively joined a couple of efforts in, like translation, or
X11 bug fixes and things like this, and eventually I joined the Accessibility
Team.

J: Well, the road brought to the accessibility team side. I spoke to a few men
before the interview, and you know, a blind user. What... I'm assuming, you
know, you're a sighted person, and you know, you can use a computer like a
normal person. What made you want to be part of the accessibility team?

S: So, actually, at the same time I got an Internet connection, a permanent
Internet connection, I also met a friend of mine, in our University, who is
blind, and who is also a really geeky guy, I mean, he started using Linux by
writing his own driver to make his braille device work [Ahaha, Wow!] so before
using Linux he had to know how to program it! [Oh my goodness, that's XXX] So
that's the way we got friend of course, and we talked a lot about this, and
he proposed me to start a project about providing an API for applications to
write braille on devices, independently from the device driver, and things like
this, just to be able to push text, and then be done. So that's called BrlAPI,
the Braille API, who is now used regularly on Linux and Windows. [Yeah.] And so,
by... It's been ten years since we started in 2001. During that time, I talked a
lot with him to really understand the problems, the consequences of this and
that, and some solutions which are not really good solutions, and etc. So
eventually I have a bit of an idea of the problems and be able to solve it.

J: That's pretty cool.  And you mentioned that you worked on the braille
drivers. Do you do anything with, like, the Orca team, or having done work like
Speakup, or anything like that?

S: So the thing is, the accessibility stuff is split in a few groups, in that
we, with my friend, are mostly working on the low-level parts: drivers and the
API, and then Orca people use it, so of course we do exchange on the API, they
ask us for being able to write dots, and small details like this, but then they
are doing all they are doing all their reviewing stuff in the Gnome interface,
and so we don't have to deal with that, there are people handling this.

J: OK, so you're not directly working with the Gnome Accessibility team, you're
doing like a more low-level stuff [Yes] that hides into the gnome accessibility.
I mean, do you guys work on any stuff like that, or is the Debian Accessibility
team more focused on this low-level stuff, or when things crop up, you know, say
like within Orca or maybe like a magnification software, whatever, do you try to
help that out also?

S: So, well, our Team, the Debian Team, is mostly concerned with making things
work smoothly for Debian users. That is, make sure that the default
configuration works, and things like this, so connecting everything together,
mostly. Then, when there are bugs and things like this, we just forward to the
gnome accessibility team, which we do know quite a lot, we have a couple of
friends there, but the Debian Team itself doesn't try to solve this, because
it's so complicated, and we have so few people.

J: So, could you give us an idea of like, the overall goal for the Debian
Accessibility team, like... I know Debian is a pretty, like, upstream-based kind
of distribution, the work you are doing, you're trying to push it upstream so
that, you know, all the other distros, I'm assuming, can benefit from, you know,
the work that you guys do?

S: Yes, actually, we almost do not apply any patches to our packages, so we
mostly make sure that they are integrated upstream, and then we apply to Debian,
so that merging after the new release comes out is trivial. Now, our real goal
is to have accessibility tools integrated into the standard process of Debian.
Like, the standad installation CD is able to detect when a braille device is
connected, and then automatically enable the screen reader for this. Ideally for
instance, if a Debian box was in some library, or somewhere in a public place,
you should be able to just plug-in your braille device, and then get your
braille output. [Hum] That's really the ideal goal. Or press a special shortcut
to enable speech and then get speech reading etc. That's really the goal to... for
people to be independent from anything.

J: With the braille driver that you have for Debian, does that work right away
with like the installer, can a blind person install Debian using a braille
display?

S: Yes, just put the CD with braille device plugged-in, and then it works!

J: Do you know which braille devices are compatible?

S: Err, well the list is extremely long, it depends on how you count this, but
it's most of the models, of what is available. And actually, now that we have a
windows version of BRLTTY, which is the drivers that we use, now that we have
a windows version of this that is more and more used by schools and people and
this and that, and the manufacturers are actually sending us some devices before
they are actually released on the market, so we can actually write the driver
for them [That's cool!] It's really working, yeah, yeah, that's... it's really
working nowadays.

J: Yeah, that what's great with, you know, opensource software and opensource
drivers, that's great that these display companies are jumping on board and, you
know, asking for your input, basically. [Exactly]. Outside of the braille, the
braille displays, has the Debian Accessibility team implemented any other
technology that we might, that I might myself take for granted, or I didn't know
that you guys have implemented it?

S: So, the problem with accessibility is that the kind of issues that people may
have is really, really diverse [Yeah]. So, braille is one solution, we also have
support for hardware speech synthesis, so you need a hardware board that you
plug into your computer, or you plug through a serial port, and then you have
hardware speech synthesis. So this is implemented and you have to enable it by
hand because it can not be detected. I tried, but still failed to find the time
and manage to discuss with the ALSA people, to get the software speech
integrated into the Debian Installer. So we have an experimental image that has
speech synthesis, I mean software speech synthesis. There is also the
high-contrast installation theme, that is when you enable it, you get nice
white on black drawings and letters, so for people who have problems with
constrasts, it's a lot easier to read than the usual theme. So we could also
implemented other themese, it's up to people to request for some. And that's
mostly it, there are of things that could be done, like an integrated magnifier,
or things like this. It's difficult to integrated into the installer, since
there are size constraints, and software stack constraints. The thing is, now
that we have g11 installer that is a graphical (based on x11) installer, it
should be easier for us to try to integrated this, because that's then just the
mainstream accessibility tools.

J: And, I was speaking earlier, I was asking about, like a talking installer,
and you said the main goal is to not make a special version of Debian but
actually implement into the, you know, the regular version of Debian, that way
there won't be a need to, like, you know, make a special version just for a
talking installer, you'd like be able to implement it.

S: Yeah. Because the thing is: when you get a CD from somebody, it's a standard
CD. And also all the derivatives from Debian should also have accessibility
enabled. It's not because you're doing some music stuff and using some
music-oriented derivative of Debian that you shouldn't be able to use it
disability tools, so it's really important that it's integrated right at the
root of everything.

J: If... When you're able to integrate this into the main Debian CD, is this a
process that other distributions could follow, to make their installation also
be... you know, for a blind person to install?

S: Yes, actually Debian is not the first one which has done such process, there
was SUSE, the SUSE distribution already had some, a few years ago already.
Debian started a couple of years ago, first by integrating the braille support,
and then speech synthesis. There are some modified version of RedHat, of Ubuntu,
and things like this, with accessibility enabled. But yes, of course, it's a
matter of getting people to talk with each other for integrating things properly
so they remain there. It was quite long in Debian to get everything into the
Debian Installer. Just for instance, the beep that we now have when the CD is
booted and is at the boot menu: it took maybe a month or something of
discussions, like 30 of 40 mails, just to discuss about how to do it properly,
whether to enable just for releases, etc., whether it will bother people, it's
really a long process that is quite tedious, and people don't necessarily take
the time to do it, but for me it's really important, so that's why I did it.

J: Yeah, definitely. I mean, there's a way to make it so it's not in the way
of, you know, sighted people, people that don't need any accessibility, but
it's still there, for the people that do need, you know, special XXX to get it,
and operating system installed by themselves, it doesn't get in the way of the
sighted people, but it's still there for the other people that might need it.

S: Typically, a blind guy can be at 2 o'clock in the morning and needing
somebody who is sighted just to read something on the screen, that's really a
situation that is not a good thing for people.

J: Yeah. Yeah exactly, I mean, some people might not really have the help at all
and if they don't, then there's nothing they can do about it.

S: Yeah, I just wanted to also talk about the integration, not only into the
Debian installer, but also in other parts of the Debian distribution, that is
the, of course, the installation manual, but also the new maintainer guide, the
bug tracker, to add accessibility tags there, we also have tags for... debtags,
and things like this, there are a lot of areas where we can just integrate
accessibility, just like internationalization was integrated actually

J: Hum! And when I was speaking earlier about the accessibility team mailing
list, you said you have a few hundred people, but unfortunately there's only,
there's a handful of people that actually contribute, right?

S: Yes. Well, there is also some statistics that, I can't remember who {Andreas
Tille}, made, on the top posters of the list, and there is, yeah, two people
mostly, and then a couple of others who are not really developers, but who are
really knowledgeable users who contribute to the discussions, but without really
contribution code.

J: What sort of help, I'm assuming that the help is actually mostly needed in
contributing code, I assume, right?

S: Yes and no. There are a couple of documentation fixes that would be needed.
The biggest concern we have is that there are a lot of packages that we could
put into Debian, like speech synthesis, and small tools like, I discovered a
virtual keyboard, and virtual something and a lot of handy tools that could be
integrated. Of course that's a lot of packages and only two people can not
maintain them by themselves. So just packaging, it's already a good thing, as
well as just packaging text equivalents of tools. For instance, for this
interview we are using mumble, and it doesn't have a text equivalent in Debian.
I don't know if one exists, if there is none then somebody should take the time
to export the code of mumble into a library that both the graphical version and
the textual version could make use of. And then the textual version is kind of
more usable by a lot of people.

J: Yeah, I know, I totally know, because mumble open the QT library and that is
unfortunately, like completely unaccessible.

S: Well, for now. There is work in QT to get accessibility. Actually there is a
whole framework in this, but it's not yet connected with the standard Orca screen
reader, it's mostly for technical and political reasons, it's just that it
wasn't made, that we should get it in a few years maybe.

J: Ok, so there actually is work being done on that, then.

S: Yes, the work exists, so we shouldn't say it's not accessible, but the thing
is right now it's not connected to Orca.

J: I see, that's why it doesn't work, OK. Is there anything else that the
Accessibility Team is working on currently?

S: Mmm...

J: I'm sorry, what did you say?

S: Well, it's a good question, mostly for now we are moving to the AT-SPI2
framework, which is precisely one of the things for libqt to become accessible,
which is using dbus instead of the bonobo/corba toolstack of gnome. So we will
not make the transition for Squeeze, we will wait for Wheezy, because we're not
sure how it will work etc., so for now we are doing, we are not doing it right
now, but we will do it someday.

J: XXX. I'm just trying to... XXX. I was looking at the Debian Pure Blends
before, and it seems like there could be like an accessible pure blend, do you
know much about that?

S: Mmm, yes, I do. It's actually a long discussion, there is already an
accessibility blend. The thing is, it's not meant to be exactly like other
blends. In that, for us, accessibility is really transverse, it should apply to
any blend you would want to create, it's really orthogonal to any kind of things
you want to do with a computer, or something like this. Still, the tools used
for blends, in that we have a set of packages that we can group into some
"tasks", like "braille", "speech", things like this, and the interesting thing
is that the tool can generate a webpage with all the information on the
packages that are available. Which is not necessarily so easy to find just by
packages names or the debtag could, or things like this, it's more organised. We
actually already had some kind of list like this on the wiki, but just using the
blend mechanism is interesting. The danger, I would say, is to let people thing
that just adding the "accessibility" task to their distribution or their CD or
system etc. is just enough to get accessibility working. Ideally, it should be
working that way, but there are always a lot of things that are not so easy. So
yes, there is work on this and we are talking with people on this, but it's
really not a simple matter.

J: So it's not... When I looked at it, it think the project hadn't even been
started yet, has, there'd even be like an image of this accessibility blend, or
is this still being worked on?

S: The thing is: there shouldn't be an image. In that it doesn't mean anything
to say "this is an accessible distribution". Saying "this is an accessible
generic-purpose distribution", yes it does make sense, it's just a
generic-purpose distribution which happens to have accessibility tools
installed. It's really orthogonal to any kind of image that you would want to
generate, and ideally it should be integrated in all the images that you want to
build. [Yeah, yeah.] So, it doesn't mean something "yes, this is an accessible
version of Debian": Debian itself should be accessible, already.

J: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And that's again what the accessibility team is
working on [Yeah]. You know, you don't want to cause any more...

S: Ghettoization. [Yeah] It's really a strong word, but I really like... like,
well, sort of like, to use it, just to express the danger of putting
accessibility stuff in some corner saying "this is handled there". No, it has to
be handled everywhere.

J: Yeah, exactly, because you never, like you said before, you never when you
might, you know, run into someone who can [Yeah] use accessibility and then
you're like "Oh wait, I only have the regular Debian CD, I don't have the
Accessible Debian CD" [Exactly]. It should just be into the actual Debian
distribution, as all the other distributions.

S: Yeah, for instance at the University, if some blind student comes out, just a
new student and he has to do some work in our computer room, well he should be
able to just connect his display to any computer in the room, and don't have to
do anything about it. [Yeah] We are using the Ubuntu distribution, which
actually inherits all the accessibility work that we do in Debian so the things
that we do in Debian should get into Ubuntu, and then be available in our rooms
in the University.

J: Yeah, even better to that point, you know, a disabled person, a blind person,
that needs special help with the computer, they should be able to sit down in
any computer room, and also be able to use it, you shouldn't, you know the
person, they shouldn't have to, you know, "oh, we have this special computer
over here for you, you can only use this one" [Yeah, exactly] Or "sorry, you
can't use any of our computers, because we don't have any accessibility, you
know, product or products on any of these computers".

S: Yeah, that's it. Usually the Debian installs all the internationalization and
translations, and that's the same for accessibility. So that the user can just
choose.

J: Yeah, yeah, exactly, I know the Linux distributions are more and more, you
know, maybe some distributions don't pay attention to it as much as others,
but, you know, for the most part, if you are using at least the gnome version
of a Linux distribution, has a good chance, you know at least Orca is installed
already, and you can, you know, you can hopefully setup your braille display and
stuff like that.

S: Yeah, actually it took some time to discuss with the Debian Installer team,
to get Orca always installed by default when the gnome desktop is chosen, and so
we discussed about this that it should be installed so that people can pick it
up even if we didn't, the administrator didn't expect somebody to come out, and
then "oh, I need to install this", no, it should be installed by default. And
one very good thing with the Debian community is that, maybe a few months later
or a year later, somebody filed a bug saying "well, we are installing Orca, is
this really needed?", and then the Debian Installation team, itself, explained
to that person "no {actually meant yes}, because this and this and that". We
didn't even have, I mean, the Accessibility Team, we didn't have to explain that
again [Hum!]. People had taken it into account and integrated it into their
process. So that's really a good thing in the Debian Community I think, people
really get it.

J: Yeah, yeah, I've that a couple of time before and some distributions, they
wouldn't even have orca installed, you'd have to install with the package
manager, you know, and if you have to do that, it's almost pointless, because if
a blind person would buy himself, or herself, again, they wouldn't be able to do
that, because they would need Orca to get to the package manager to
install

S: Exactly! [Haha!] That's the bootstrap problem, yes.

J: Yeah, and then sometimes, there's even some distributions that have Orca
installed, but they don't bother having like the gnome speech packages
installed, or like festival or espeak, so Orca would start up, but there is no
speech synthesizer, so again, that's, you know, kind of useless, you know.

S: Yes, well, I wouldn't say that Debian doesn't do this as well, [jiggles], but
well, yes, that's the kind of thing people need to be careful with. Then there
is just one detail: you do not necessarily have to install all the accessibility
tools [Hum]. There is a kind of difference between the tools that you _need_ to
be able to use a computer, and the tools that _help_ you use a computer. For
instance, people who are colorblind, can use a computer without really great
problems. Then, when dealing with some things, he might prefer to use some
filters, to recalibrate the colors, to his eye. And that's the kind of thing
that, yes, that could be optional. [Yeah. Do you know] Because you can install
it afterwards, that's not a problem.

J: Do you know how, I don't know if you've seen this project, I don't know, but
I think it's pronounced "vedics" v-e-d-i-c-s? And I think it's on sourceforge
right now, and I'm not. I think they're trying to implement it into Ubuntu, but
I'm not sure, but it's a voice recognition software that works on the gnome
desktop, and people can, you know, they can say "accessories", and then go to a
program within accessories and say open, and then they can say "sound" or "video
and sound" or whatever, and can say "banshee", and it will open banshee. Do you
know, is Debian working with this vedics team, or do you know if there is any
software Debian is working on, with like voice recognition?

S: Mmm, so I don't remember exactly, but I think we already have a couple of
voice recognition software in Debian. Well, the issue of course is that you
don't want to enable it by default [Right! Haha!] Heh! But then, another issue
with speech recognition is that, from a research point of view itself, there
hasn't been really much progress since 10 years. That is, for really specialized
things like, yes, "accessories", and a small set of words like this, it does
work quite nice, but for general-purpose use, the error rate is still between
10 and 20% [Hum!] which is really a lot and not really usable for any kind of
generic work. So... And research has really given up on this, there is no real
research on this any more, because people have tried for a long time still, and
not managed to do anything. [Hum!] So, yes, for some usages it does work indeed,
and it can be really, really useful. For now, we haven't worked on that topic
yet. Well, also because of lack of manpower.

J: Mmm, yeah, yeah. I imagine stuff needs involve people for, you know,
actually, getting stuff done. And, you know, obviously, you have a dayjob also
and whatnot [Yes, of course!], Haha! Well, Samuel, is there anything else you'd like
to cover that I might have overlooked or didn't cover, on the Accessibility Team?

S: Yes, actually, you are reminding me. To get more people involved, the thing
that people need to know is: you don't need any special kind of hardware to do
tests and things like this. I myself don't own any braille device or things
like this. Because we've implemented a virtual braille device, integrated into
BRLTTY, the set of drivers for braille devices, so there is one which doesn't
with a real braille device, but shows a window with a virtual braille device,
and so that's why actually the Debian Installation team can test the braille
support, there is a wiki page about this, how to start BRLTTY, and then to start
the installer in kvm with the support for virtual braille hardware, so there
are two things, the virtual braille device showing on the screen, and a virtual
braille hardware running, emulated by kvm, and the two are connected through
BrlAPI. So for instance, to test the braille output, you don't need any kind of
hardware, you can just run this. Of course, for speech synthesis, you don't need
anything in particular, just need a sound board. There are a couple of things
like people who can just press a button, and then there are special devices that
just have a button, so this kind of device is maybe not easy to find. But still,
you can work on some features, using this kind of hardware, not having to find
out one. Just get to talk with people who have the needs, to really understand
the way they are working, etc. and then you can work without problems.

J: Is there like a website, an IRC room, that would people could go to if they
want to start contributing?

S: Mmm, so there is the mailing list of course. There is a wiki page on the
Debian website, so I can't remember exactly where, but from the wiki main page,
you can search for "accessibility", and then you should find it [OK]. There is
also a website that I'm running with my friend, which is called
brl.thefreecat.org, so a cat that is free, just in one word. There, there are a
couple of pointers to some talks I made, a howto test text applications, and
things like this. So if you google brlapi, you should find it.

J: OK. And they'll find a link to the mailing list on the wiki page, to the
debian wiki page. [Yeah] Is there an IRC channel or no?

S: Err... I think there is, yes. We're not using it a lot, because there are
just two of us [Yeah], and we have other IRC channels, but yes, there is a
#debian-a11y IRC channel on oftc, so people can join. We are there, we just
don't discuss at all.

J: OK, yeah, yeah. Well, Samuel, is there anything else, that you would like to
go over?

S: Mmm, I think we are mostly done. [Yeah] Of course, there are a lot of, that
we talk about accessibility, like how you can make your applications accessible,
but that's other kinds of topics, and there are talks about this.

J: Yeah, I'd like, maybe I'll have you another time, I'd like to give a lot more
time to that, because that would be very useful for a lot of developers I think.
And I'd like to know myself, but I think that'd be great if developers would at
least take into consideration, making their applications, you know, more
accessible. You know,

S: I would say that it's as easy as making an application translatable. [Hum!] I
mean, it's really the same kind of process, you have to be careful from the
start, and then it's easy.

J: OK, yeah, definitely, I'm definitely going to have you again on this, I'd
love to talk about, maybe we can get Mario on next time too, and I'd like to
talk about that again, definitely. Alright, well, Samuel, thank you for your
time and your help, and let Mario know we thank him for his help and work, and
like I said hopefully next time we can get him on also, and I'd love to talk
about building accessible applications, that'd be great.

S: OK, thanks to you.

J: Alright, thank you Samuel, thanks for your time, I appreciate it.

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