Re: few questions

[Bill Haneman <Bill Haneman Sun COM>]

Jason Grieves wrote:

> Hi Bill (and all),
>
> I am not quite sure if my last emails went through as I had some major 
> email problems.  If these are repeats, pardon me.
>
> 1) Has an accessibility "options" center been discussed in Gnome 
> before?  Similar to what Microsoft has in the control panel, along 
> side with a wizard?  I know older and less technical welcome the 
> wizards and configuration assistants.  It would not seem to hard to 
> do, but I realize it could provide some discrepencies with 
> non-accessible users.  Would there be 2 places to change the same 
> feature?  I.e. keyboard accessibility via Preferences> Keyobard versus 
> lets say a tab with the AccessX features

We have resisted, for the most part, the temptation to put all of the 
features that are of interest to accessibility into a special 
"Accessibility" section.  There are many reasons for this, including the 
fact that many relevant features are of general interest, the fact that 
some users don't self-identify as disabled, and our desire not to 
"ghettoize" accessibility.   However, some sort of wizard or user-config 
helper would be useful, I agree.  I think the best way to do this is via 
a general purpose "user profile" capability for the Gnome desktop, but 
this is still a project for the future.  In general Gnome's Human 
Interface Guidelines say one should avoid having two separate dialogs 
which change the same feature.

> 2) Bill does the magnifier need to be recompiled to work with the 
> extensions (i.e. Damage) you spoke of?

Yes, it must be built on a system that has the extensions, in order to 
use them.  On most OS'es this should be true, because most distros will 
probably be running a recent XOrg server when building.  However there 
is no guarantee that this is true.  If the magnifier was built without 
DAMAGE or COMPOSITE support, it will report this when started from the 
console in standalone mode, i.e. if you run "magnifier -v -m" the 
magnifier should report if it was compiled without DAMAGE or XFIXES support.

Bill