"Mousetweaks requires Assistive Technologies."
I used this as the first example in a little post I made regarding
courteous software.
Let's pretend for a moment I am a disabled person who has trouble with
mouse buttons. I am trying to turn on a critical accessibility feature,
and I think I see light at the end of the tunnel.
...
Nope, never mind. Instead, this program decides to tease me! It throws a
cryptic error message, telling me that it requires "assistive
technologies". It essentially orders me to give it these technologies,
and it refuses to do anything until I satisfy its demands. I can feel
the confused phone calls starting already!
In the layman's thoughts: Of course it "needs assistive technologies";
it /is/ an assistive technology! This error message is lazy, cruel and
unusual. It does not offer to enable assistive technologies, and it does
not elaborate on what the heck it means to begin with. It simply refuses
to work, leaving people to give up or phone their relatives. There is no
reason for this evil, either; the software here has complete access to
the necessary controls such that it should be able to transparently
enable "Assistive Technologies" without the end user needing to think
about it. At the least, it could have a button leading to the "Assistive
Technologies" preferences or a kind explanation of what "assistive
tecnologies" are if not the technology the user is trying to enable.