@fastfinge I wish so much of this wasn't on-point.
* I don't have enough of an understanding of the addon store stuff to be informed, but pulling Remote into core seemed a lot of work for relatively little gain to me. * the on-device description stuff was mad, given the profusion of other addons already out there and its crapness when they did work on it, * and the lack of a bridge from 64 bit felt like a kick in the teeth. as you say: the move was needed, but the support for developers fell short.
I love NVDA and will champion it, but I do wonder about the direction and decisionmaking sometimes.
@cachondo@fastfinge None of it is on point, and if he'd bothered taking the time to actually ask us any of the questions up front, we would happily have cleared up any confusion.
@NVAccess@cachondo So anyone with any questions at all should ask directly and in private? That doesn’t scale. The fact you can’t point anyone to the public places where these answers can be found is even worse.
@fastfinge No one said that. It's an open source project, discussion happens on the issue tracker and/or mailing list. Or you can ask them here. You know this. Should NVDA have a full time public relations person to handle all concerns? Who pays for that? What priorities suffer?
Your piece seems somewhat premised on the idea that you must trust NVAccess in an informational vacuum. I don't think that's true at all. You could just... ask them why they did XYZ. If that answer isn't satisfactory, okay, the discussion has moved forward.
@prism@fastfinge@cachondo Thank you. And yes, I have spent the last hour or so on this thread, and I haven't even got to half the article yet. So this HAS cost the organisation my time in doing this, when I suspect most of it could have been resolved just by asking a couple of questions first. And just to be clear, asking questions is perfectly fine. It's where they are done as public accusations of poor behaviour without first having obtained the facts that it gets frustrating
@NVAccess@prism@cachondo And that can only happen when the facts aren’t already public. For an open source foundation, that is a problem in and of itself. However, I apologize for wasting your time. In future, I’ll be sure to waste just as much of your time asking questions that should have had public answers when the pull requests were first opened.
Ok just to satisfy you that it isn't only my time you've taken up this morning, but our other staff who also tried to work through your post, here is a comment from one of our developers:
* NVDA Magnifier available for early testing and feedback: This presents a fait accompli. It doesn't answer questions like "Why did NV Access decide to do this? Why now? Why part of NVDA and not a separate app?" Yes, I realize someone else is doing the initial work. But NV Access still needs to review it, merge it, maintain it, and so on. Just because someone does a thing doesn't mean it's in the project scope. I've refused fully formed pull requests for being out of scope. I'm sure NV Access has, too.
* AI Image descriptions progress: once again, discussion of a thing that's already happening. Not a discussion of why it's happening, or why it was done as part of core and not an addon, and no record of the reasoning and discussion behind the decision. This answers none of the questions I asked.
* Add-on store discussion: this, and the pr linked from it, get way closer to the sort of thing I'm looking for, and the sort of thing I saw all the time from NVAccess in the 2010's and early 2020's, but see much less of now. We get some insight into the thinking. Though we still don't get insight into why NVDA wanted to control the source of addons, and not leave it to the Spanish community, or discussion of the proes and cons of changing the review process for addon developers and how that decision was achieved.
* [Project] Convert NVDA to 64 bit #16304: And right here, we see the user story "Create a 32bit backwards compatible API for synth drivers and braille displays". With a five day final estimate. What happened here? Is this still happening? I did try to find out before I wrote anything at all. It remained unclear. So I'm still in a state where NV Access said a thing was going to happen, the thing did not happen, and I can't tell why or if it will happen later or never.
Samuel is a confused user who wrote what reads like a frustrated takedown piece, having hit a straw that broke the camel’s back moment in perceived lack of transparency.
NVAcess doesn’t have a public relations person, but its account that relates to the public is doing that job in a defensive stance.
You guys should kiss and make up.
You’re also kind of both right. Let’s look at the magnifier, since I consider myself an expert user of Windows Magnifier and ZoomIt:
There was no back room decision, it’s all very transparent. Here’s the GitHub issue where it was discussed:
A low vision user reported that Windows Magnifier was not following the NVDA virtual cursor.
My instant thought? No big deal, Magnifier can already follow keyboard focus, just have an option to move to mouse to the virtual cursor all the time and leverage the existing tool.
There was a discussion on the Windows Magnifier to Narrator private APIs and then the decision was make to add a magnifier solution to NVDA.
About a year later an add-on author said they’d addressed this issue by moving the mouse cursor and only had a pending problem with tabbing. They were advised the team was already working on a magnifier, but that they could open a PR for this issue.
The issue was ultimately closed by the PR that introduced the magnifier implementation.
This was discussed, decided and implemented completely in the open, and prioritized in a very surprising way.
“I can’t keep my pants up with this belt.” “We’ll make you a new pair of pants.” “I have this hole punch I used to tighten my belt.” “We’re already making the new pants.”
There are valid criticisms to make here, but they had their time and place: that issue.
I know a lot of people have accessibility and other issues with GitHub, but that is where this FOSS project is developed and that’s where enthusiastic community members should contribute. I also know there have been discussions about how to make that process more approachable for more people. That’s good, keep doing that.
Just my two cents. I hope this can put things into perspective for you guys and turn this to a more productive direction.
@MostlyBlindGamer@fastfinge@cachondo@prism Always happy to acknowledge where I can do better, and I must admit, logging on to a flood of messages and a 6,000+ word essay attacking us, most of which was not accurate, it was difficult to know where to start. In any case, I definitely don't have any animosity to Sam. Indeed, I appreciate Sam's passion and enthusiasm. Albeit it was a bit .... overwhelming all at once :)
@NVAccess@MostlyBlindGamer@cachondo@prism I’ve been using and watching NVDA since back in the source forge days. And the change in the decision making still feels obvious to me. The magnifier issue unearthed adds to the point I’m making, not detracts from it. There was no central strategy thought behind it. It just sort of happened. It’s also alarming that any public criticism, no matter how frequently couched in my love and respect for NVDA, is an “attack” that must be “defended” against. I’ll sign off this thread by saying that framing criticism as a battle with winners and losers makes healthy and productive discourse impossible.
@fastfinge Sam, I respect you a lot, but you are misrepresenting the situation. You say decisions were made with no public discussion, then when people point out the very public discussion that happened, you call it an attack. No one attacked you. No one said you have to email anyone to get a response, or take the discussion private. You made that up, like the rest of your six thousand word treatous railing against the only free and open source screenreader in the known universe, which boils down to "things just aint how they use to be."
NVAccess can't say this, so I will: if you don't like the decisions made, you're welcome to use something else, or create it. @cachondo@NVAccess@MostlyBlindGamer
@prism@cachondo@NVAccess@MostlyBlindGamer Huh? NVAccess repeatedly complained that I was attacking them. As have you. That was my complaint. I never framed anything as an attack. Everyone else put on that framing, and it immediately killed all useful discussion. And that was my complaint. The fact that folks are so defensive about NVDA that you can’t have this discussion without putting words in my mouth means the entire thread is useless. Because this is a battle that you have to win by defeating me. So nothing can or will ever change, and nothing useful will happen, until that framing (that I never once placed or agreed to) is gone.
@fastfinge Again, the reason no discussion is happening is because you keep circling back to "no discussion can happen" after being pointed you to the discussion that happened, and being invited to ingage further on said discussions. You don't like that the magnifier is in core? Okay. I don't like that the magnifier is in core. So leave an issue comment. A response will be forethcoming. If the nature of that response is unsatisfactory, then you write the blog post.
I don't think you are being intentionally disingenuous, I'm sorry I said you made up the stuff in your post. I should not have. But imagine if someone, out of nowhere, wrote up a huge essay about something you did a year and a half ago, didn't ask you about it first, and signed off with "ultimately, the problem is trust." You would feel attacked by that, especially if it was your livelyhood. An open letter format comes off very aggressive to me, as an observer. I'm clearly not the only one who took it that way.
@prism@cachondo@NVAccess@MostlyBlindGamer And doing so misses the point entirely. Past decisions were made. The work is done, now. As I stated both in the introduction and the conclusion, the thing that concerns me is the pattern of decision making without strategic discussion I couldn’t find. When I point it out, I get pointed to implementation level discussion, IE the “how” and not the “why” or the “should we”. Re-litigating past decisions gets no closer to being more strategic about future decisions. There purpose is, once again, as I said in the article, to demonstrate the pattern I’ve noticed.
