Kenny Hitt <[email protected]> wrote: > Hi. In my view, Gnome accessibility will never succeed. It will sometimes > get close, but will never make it all the way. I came to this conclusion > after using Gnome versions from2.2 through 2.28. I've seen several > occasions where a change in Gnome broke accessibility. Combine that with > the fact apps aren't required to be accessible before being included in > Gnome, and you have a recipe for failure.
I actually think Gnome accessibility efforts are remarkably successful, given the limited resources available and the nature of the problems that need to be solved. The role of operating system distributions in deciding what to package, and which applications to offer as defaults, should also be borne in mind. The decision process doesn't have the same top-down control structure that a proprietary operating system vendor can exercise. The decentralized community is part of what makes free software great, notwithstanding the difficulties that can arise when negotiations are underway in regard to resources, priorities, what to include in a release, etc. I think the accessibility situation would be considerably better if user interfaces were specified in a much more abstract way, and then styled according to the needs and capabilities of the user, and of the input and output devices. Obviously, doing this properly would involve designing an entire UI infrastructure from the ground up. Until that happens, I suspect, accessibility will remain to some extent an "add-on", and therefore vulnerable. Another way of saying this is that the more application developers have to think about "accessibility" as a discrete, separate phenomenon that needs to be taken into account, the more accessibility is likely to lose, despite constant "education" efforts and repair strategies to deal with the deluge of regressions. To be specific, I think the user interface component of XForms, and the somewhat similar Universal Remote Console specification, are indicative of what is possible, and that's only the beginning. Web interfaces might also help here, depending on the extent to which the necessary semantics are built into the core infrastructure of the Web; there's a danger that add-ons such as Aria will become entrenched as long-term solutions rather than as interim measures to be phased out once the underlying formats become sufficiently expressive. As to me, I'm staying in my Emacs and console sessions as much as possible, but I'm glad Gnome accessibility is here when I need it - and I really do need it, in some circumstances, especially, at the moment, for the Web. My main reason for using Gnome only as needed is not so much a lack of accessibility, but rather that I don't like the WIMP (Windows/Icons/Menus/Pointers) paradigm and the type of user interface to which it gives rise. This is not to say that I reject graphical user interfaces - in fact, there are interfaces that make full use of a graphical display without imposing the limitations of your typical WIMP-style interface - but I find user interfaces which are based fundamentally on a point-and-select model rather than a language/command-based interaction far too restrictive. Text editors are a superb example of this; compare Emacs (or Vi, if you prefer) with a typical GUI/WIMP-based editor, for instance. (I'm well aware that both Emacs and Vi can run as full X applications, which shows why it would be wrong to characterize my point of view as critical of graphical interfaces as such.) As a final thought regarding where this is all headed, there remain open questions as to the future role of Web applications. "Firefox wants to be Emacs", as pointed out in this post: http://tjic.com/?p=8916 and I think chromium is headed even more strongly in that direction. If user interfaces, including the free software/open-source community, are headed toward an era in which a descendant of what we today call a "Web browser" becomes the desktop, then what would make most sense is a Javascript-based "assistive technology" (for want of a better term, that can process user interfaces built on Web technologies, and which is fully integrated into the extensible browsing environment. So that's my perspective, for what it's worth. _______________________________________________ gnome-accessibility-list mailing list [email protected] http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/gnome-accessibility-list
