Re: GSOC 2008 advice

[Shaun McCance <shaunm gnome org>]

On Thu, 2008-02-28 at 08:18 -0500, Luis Villa wrote:
> One followup, one other suggestion, one followup.
> On Tue, Feb 26, 2008 at 2:49 PM, Luis Villa <luis tieguy org> wrote:
> >  * "widgets": Vista, OSX, and KDE4 all have widgets/gadgets/Kthingies
> >  that are pretty, very easy to use, very easy to develop (since they
> >  are web-based), and which display more information when needed while
> >  staying hidden when not needed (both unlike our panel applets.) Some
> >  work has already been done on doing this with gtk-webkit[1]- perhaps
> >  that could be built on? (It seems to me that from a user perspective
> >  this approach is really superior to applets and what we should be
> >  focusing on long-term instead of reworking applets, but YMMV.)
> 
> Both screenlets and gdesklets have been pointed out to me offlist. I
> was aware of both of them, but I didn't mention them here because I
> don't think writing our own custom widgets is the way to go- we should
> (at least to start) join the html-based widget bandwagon everyone else
> is already on so that we can benefit from that base of applications.
> Perhaps adding HTML widget support to one of them is the right thing,
> though.

Given that the Foundation has just earmarked US$50,000 for
accessibility-related bounties, I'm curious how HTML widgets
fare with accessibility.  I often hear that dynamic web 2.0
applications are suboptimal in terms of accessiblity, and
this would naturally translate to suboptimal accessibility
in HTML widgets.

I'd be very interested to see an analysis from one of our
accessibility experts on this subject.

--
Shaun