Accesibility capplets

[Seth Nickell <snickell stanford edu>]

On Tue, 2002-04-30 at 04:50, Calum Benson wrote:
> Havoc Pennington wrote:
> > 
> > For accessibility I think one capplet with tabs as in Windows XP would
> > be fine.
> 
> The reason we chose to go for an accessibility sub-category rather than
> a single Accessibility capplet with tabs, incidentally, is largely
> because it's not yet obvious how many things are going to have to go in
> there.  
> 
> We envisage that any GNOME assistive technology should install some sort
> of capplet under the Accessibility category, so that you can configure
> all desktop accessibility features from the one place, and that could
> easily run to more things than ought to go in a single tabbed dialog. 
> Apart from AccessX, we already have Gnopernicus, GOK, and gnome-speech
> in the pipeline, for example, and it would probably be a good idea if
> you could pick an accessible theme from somewhere in here too.  And
> that's before we've even thought about any braille devices etc...

Also, I'm not entirely sure of this, but I have a sense that in the
control center context tabs and sub-menus are really two ways of
performing similar functions. We tend to think of tabs as a stronger
grouping. I don't really know where to draw the boundry. Specifically,
menus are easier to explore, but the more stuff we safely put in tabs
the fewer entries will be in the menus, the easier the menus will be to
explore ;-)

I think having a single "Appearance" capplet with tabs is bad, because
its not really obvious exactly what constitutes appearance. Fonts?
Theme? Background? Toolbars & Menus? Windows? Login Photo[1]? The point
is that it takes more mental energy because if I want to change my
background the word "appearance" isn't really mentally triggered unless
I've already trained myself to GNOME. Instead, an Appearance
sub-category (or, I think, having appearance related items be the ones
*not* subcategorized migth be good) is relatively quick to scan and find
the item you want. Of course, its even better if we don't have to
sub-categorize, because you never have to think that Background is
related to appearance at all :-)

On the flipside, it would be silly to have "Mouse Buttons" and "Mouse
Motion" menu entries. The association is strong enough that we can
confidently look for them under "Mouse", and then find the appropriate
tab.

With accesibility things get a little trickier. To many people
accesibility is just accesibility and they'll never look into it. To
users of accesibility though, items assisting with physical problems are
very different from a screen reader. In this case, since a category is
so cheap and its easier to have be 3rd-party expandable (yes, this is
making a design decision for technical reasons, I'm compromised), it
makes sense to use a category. It doesn't really cost users who won't
touch accesibility much, and it makes a lot more sense for users who
want accesibility.

-Seth