Re: [Accessibility] Call to Arms

[Eric S. Johansson]

 On 7/24/2010 6:59 PM, Richard Stallman wrote:
>      I would propose organizing the project to first satisfy the economic needs 
> of
>      the disabled community, so they can make money, they can be independent 
> and as a
>      result, be able to make choices about software freedom.
>
> That is very abstract, so I am not sure what it would imply at a
> concrete level.  I don't know what I would think of your
> practical suggestions.  But at this abstract level, I see a possible
> misunderstanding about our goals and ideals.
let me try rewording it to something a little more concrete.

If I can't make money, software philosophy doesn't matter. When I can make 
money, I am now in the position to make choices. Any philosophy that serves 
itself ahead of the needs of the disabled is actively harming the disabled.  (I 
apologize for the harshness of the sentence) the philosophy of the free software 
foundation, as  I interpret it is actively harmful to disabled users.

disability solutions will require a hybrid approach because some of the core 
components may take decades to reach parity with existing commercial solutions 
and  it is unethical to ask a population to take a backseat economically and 
socially while the free software foundation writes software to replace a 
commercial component, a component that took at least five years and some $60 mil 
(1997) with a cadre of about 100 PhD computational linguists and other 
equivalent researchers plus the data gathering effort to put together a 
high-quality corpus for training and testing.   yes, a large vocabulary 
continuous speech recognition engine is what is needed in order to do everyday 
tasks instead of a special case hack for a limited application domain. Your 
first test should be to try and write an e-mail message like this one. If you 
can't do it, the system has failed

from the perspective of a disabled person, a toolkit, a hybrid of free and 
proprietary that is available now is worth more than some folks can possibly 
imagine.  this hybrid is liberating. It is freeing. It enables disabled to 
participate in the wider world.  Waiting is death of the spirit, skills, and body.

the opposite, this is your organization. If you wish to put the free software 
philosophy ahead of the need of the disabled it is your choice. I apologize but 
could not participate with a clear conscience because it violates my ethics of 
how you treat people.

> This is not an open source project.  This is the free software
> movement -- a totally different idea.  So please don't think or speak
> of it as "open source", because that would lead you astray.

My apologies. I spoke carelessly and I will try to be more consistent in the 
future.
> There are many technical projects in which that difference of
> philosophies and values has no effect.  But here we are discussing a
> point where it is absolutely crucial.
>
> Our goal is to establish freedom for software users, and freedom is
> much broader and deeper than "freedom of choice".  Thus, our aim is
> not just that people should be able to "make choices about software
> freedom", but rather that they should actually HAVE software freedom.
>
> Proprietary software is digital colonization, unjust and evil.  Our
> goal is therefore to eliminate proprietary software.  We cannot
> eliminate it this year, but what we can and must do now is refuse to
> legitimize it.
>
> In the same way, the abolitionists did not seek to give people
> the power to make choices about freedom or slavery.  They sought
> to abolish slavery.
yeah I thought so. Look higher up in the definition of freedom to economic 
freedom.  a disabled user does not have economic freedom which means they lose 
many other forms of freedom. They frequently do not have the freedom  that other 
people do because they can't type. They can't use linked in or write an e-mail 
message. Web forums, Facebook, Google, USENET, IRC are all off limits to them. 
The foundation philosophy as expressed above is telling them that their needs 
are secondary. They need to wait and wait and wait until the right software is 
available. This is unbelievably cruel because I've seen 15 years of promises and 
vaporware with  speech recognition from the free and open software worlds. 
Hasn't happened. I have no evidence that it will.
> I see a number of factual and conceptual points that need correction.

Thank you. Always glad to get new information.
> * "Giving people the power to make choices about free software or not"
> is not the right way to think of our goal (see above).  Our goal was,
> and is, to liberate the users from proprietary software.

How about liberating people from economic misfortune, social isolation, 
disconnection from governmental services because of their disability?  how long 
should they wait?
> * We never had a policy of developing "tools" first, and that's not
> what happened.  We developed all sorts of system components in the
> 1980s, including a chess game, a PDF interpreter, and a spreadsheet.

I understand but from most developer perspectives, the toolchain was first and 
foremost. If you ask, developers of our generation, most of them will tell you 
it's the tools they need first. My first encounter was Emacs 17 on VMS. I was so 
grateful because it saved me from Digital shell environment hell.
> * I don't think those GNU tools were _necessary_ to enable people to
> write the other components of GNU.  Some of them were advances in
> convenience and power, and that may have helped people develop all
> sorts of things -- but people COULD have written other GNU components
> with vi and debugged them with dbx.

But they didn't, or at least in my world they didn't.  There was incredible 
loyalty to the new toolchain and any move by management in a half a dozen 
companies to replace it with something commercial kicked up a hell of a s*it storm.

> * Making GNU programs run on many platforms was never a high priority
> goal.  The main purpose of GNU packages is to be parts of the GNU
> system.  However, users ported some GNU packages to many platforms,
> and we accepted their changes in a spirit of cooperation.

But again, the needs of the programmer outweighed the needs of the GNU. People 
needed cross platform support. They had no choice in their OS but they want to 
build an ecosystem were free tools could make their life easier. Tools first 
then down to the core of the OS
> * I had to consider the ethical question of whether it was legitimate
> to use Unix (unethical nonfree software) in order to write GNU
> components.  My conclusion was that it is ethical to use a nonfree
> package to bootstrap a free replacement for that package.  By doing
> this, we would participate in the evil of Unix in a secondary way in
> order to put an end to it completely.

That's another way of putting my rationale behind using NaturallySpeaking. as 
Barbie would say "recognizers are hard". A language models are hard. Collecting 
rational corpus is unbelievably hard. This is why I say close to a decade or 
even more to complete this project. Then we will still have nothing in place in 
applications, toolkits, communications to make speech recognition work with 
applications.

Using NaturallySpeaking as the core, you can start connecting applications and 
toolkits to a working recognizer. It gives you experience, now. it gives you 
insights on the application recognizer interface, now. And more importantly it 
gives you information about how you need to build your recognition engine. The 
recognition engine should never be the tail that wags the dog.  if you do, you 
usually end up with a handful of poo.
>      Cultivate resources to put NaturallySpeaking under wine. Itit's very close 
> to
>      ready and the final push to make it real isn't happening. My reason for 
> this
>      step is that it removes all nonfree software except the speech recognition
>      engine. This gives us a place to work from, to experiment with various
>      techniques for cross machine speech recognition work.
>
> I agree that using NaturallySpeaking on Wine is less bad than using it
> on Windows.  But this is not a step on the path to replacing
> NaturallySpeaking, thus, for us to do this would be a detour.

That's a valid argument if you can deliver a NaturallySpeaking equivalent 
application engine in 6 to 12 months.  From what I've seen so far, you're not 
even close. As of said above, I expect 8-15 years and by then, I'll probably be 
dead or retired.  think about what this delay means. You are preventing disabled 
users from having a freer choice. without the hybrid approach I'm proposing, 
They will choose Windows with NaturallySpeaking. It's the only option available 
to the. If you can accept that it's going to take roughly a decade to your 
recognizer and can get behind NaturallySpeaking online, we could see everything 
free but the recognition application in 1/3 to 1/4 of the time. Nothing will 
stop you from continuing on the replacement application but in the intervening X 
years, upper extremity disabled users will be able to work, play, and maybe even 
write code.  I'd forgotten about that benefit. If you have programming by voice 
working using NaturallySpeaking, you have a potential pool of programmers who 
might be able to help. If you wait for your own recognizer, you've lost that 
population almost entirely by the time you're done.
>      Develop advanced dictation box which is the simplest model for
>      reliable data injection into applications.  This is the first
>      layer that will enable upper extremity disabled users to make
>      money. This is where you can start writing documentation, e-mails
>      etc.
>
> This sounds good as long as it works without proprietary software.
> But if it is would be an add-on to NaturallySpeaking, it would
> constitute enhancing proprietary software -- a counterproductive
> distraction, and improper for us to work on or even endorse.

I was speaking shorthand. It's not an add-on to NaturallySpeaking. It is an 
add-on to the communications framework between recognition application and user 
application.

I'm not sure if that made this point before but I believe fundamentally that 
there should be a divide between the recognition environment and the users 
working environment. I work with approximately 100 machines a year. I am not 
going to install recognizer on each of them nor am I going to train, install 
microphone or any of that stuff because 95% of those machines are on the far end 
of the network.  Recognition and task management takes place locally, data 
injection command-and-control takes place remotely.

I hope you can see how an application like a dictation box would be plug into 
this framework.
> If what we need is to improve the free software for speech
> recognition, so as to replace NaturallySpeaking, then that
> is what we should focus on.

That might also be the different focus. I'm looking at increasing disabled user 
freedom by functionality supplied by free software.  if we fix what's broken 
first, and replace the nonfree component either in parallel or later, we will 
deliver the most important thing, a solution to disabled users.  I don't believe 
that we should keep NaturallySpeaking around for the long term but I do believe 
it is essential component to get disabled users running now and running until 
the free solution exists.

Thank you Richard. I apologize if I've come across as testy in this but 
disability access is obviously very important to me since I am disabled. I 
appreciate your taking the time to reply and correct some of my 
misunderstandings.  I hope you better understand my philosophical foundation 
with regards to disabled users and where I would want to push the project.