Re: Proposed module: gnome-main-menu

[Bill Haneman <Bill Haneman Sun COM>]

Hi dobey;

Sorry, your previous message had gotten lost in the shuffle.  I really 
do appreciate the fact that you've kept accessibility in mind when 
working on gnome-main-menu.

That said, I'd feel much happier about things if two things happened - 
first, the orca and gok teams need to provide some feedback on the user 
experience using gnome-main-menu with those ATs.  Since the GOK team in 
particular is under-resourced at the moment, any testing with GOK in 
non-corepointer mode which you can do would be extremely helpful.

Accessibility testing scripts are nice, but in the end what matters is 
the user experience using ATs with the app.  Scripts can highlight 
problems and potential problems, but they don't really give much 
assurance that the end-to-end solution will work for blind users or 
users who can't use a keyboard.

That leads to the 'second thing' which I think needs to happen before 
any new desktop technology is included in the desktop: some sort of 
'sanity testing' with five or more user 'scenarios' (not unlike 
personas, specifically chosen with accessibility needs in mind).  Such 
sanity tests should be along the lines of the ones on the Gnome 
Accessibility Project website [1]

   * Accessibility Test Suite: Overview
     <http://developer.gnome.org/projects/gap/testing/a11y_sanity_suite.html>
     - (26-June-2004)
   * http://developer.gnome.org/projects/gap/testing/a11y_sanity_suite.html
   * GNOME Accessibility Test Suite: Details
     <http://developer.gnome.org/projects/gap/testing/a11y_sanity_gnome_details.html>
     - (26-June-2004)
   * http://developer.gnome.org/projects/gap/testing/a11y_sanity_gnome_details.html

while these tests are old (I think inside Sun we have updated them a 
bit), they show the basic ideas and would serve to introduce the user 
scenarios which give good accessibility/AT coverage.  Note that the 
above docs reference some test specs which are kept in cvs, so that they 
can be kept up-to-date for community use.

Best regards,

Bill

[1] I know, we need to migrate this to live.gnome.org...

Rodney Dawes wrote:
> On Tue, 2007-01-09 at 17:44 +0000, Bill Haneman wrote:
>   
> > Since there was a lot of a11y work in the existing menu code, I doubt 
> > that g-m-m would "just work" for all of our a11y scenarios without 
> > bugfixes/tweaks.
> >     
>
> Can you explain those scenarios? As I said in a previous reply, I spent
> a lot of time making a11y in the main-menu work. If there are specific
> scenarios that we need to check for, then we should get those formalized
> into a test suite somewhere, and get the tests run on all our apps.
>
> -- dobey
>
>
>