Re: Proposal: enable accessibility by default for GNOME
- From: Willie Walker <William Walker Sun COM>
- To: desktop-devel-list gnome org
- Subject: Re: Proposal: enable accessibility by default for GNOME
- Date: Thu, 31 Jul 2008 11:32:23 -0400
Willie Walker wrote:
Excellent discussion so far. I'm going to write up a summary shortly.
Here's what I'm seeing from this good discussion:
PRIMARY ARGUMENTS AGAINST ENABLING A11Y BY DEFAULT:
---------------------------------------------------
1) Performance. From recent tests, it does look like the ATK/GAIL
peering can add significant memory overhead to each GTK+ app, and this
will happen regardless of whether assistive technologies are used or
not. This is a valid concern, especially if the overhead is as bad as
my tests seem to indicate. :-(
2) Stability. Some people mention concerns about stability and have
personal anecdotes about a11y seeming to make things crash. Others have
personal anecdotes about a11y not causing any stability issues at all.
PRIMARY ARGUMENTS FOR ENABLING A11Y BY DEFAULT:
-----------------------------------------------
1) It's easier for a person w/o disabilities to turn it off than it is
for a person with disabilities to turn it on.
2) The a11y infrastructure can be used for more things than just a11y.
Consider, for example, an on screen keyboard for devices w/o physical
keyboards.
3) Better overall testing/usage coverage for all users. If a11y were
enabled by default, we'd end up rooting out problems that developers
might otherwise ignore or just be unaware of. That is, people with
disabilities want just as much stability as people without disabilities,
except they don't have the option of disabling accessibility. As the
GNOME development community, I think it is our responsibility to work
together to identify and fix stability issues. Even stronger, I find it
unacceptable to say "my component has issues with a11y enabled, so I'm
going to ignore a11y and just disable it. Let those crazy a11y pundits
give me a patch if they want it so bad."
POSSIBLE WAYS FORWARD:
----------------------
1) Turn it on by default.
2) Keep it off by default. Re-evaluate the situation once the
AT-SPI/D-Bus work is complete.
3) Keep it off by default. Provide some sort of best practices document
for OS distributions to include some sort of "enable/customize
accessibility" option as part of the installation process. This might
also spill over into an "enable/customize accessibility" option in the
users and groups administration tool.
4) Keep it off by default. Provide some sort of "refresh this session"
support that keeps the user logged in, but basically kills everything on
the desktop and restarts gnome-session. With this, users would have the
similar "you must enable accessibility support" experience that they
have today, but they wouldn't need to log out and log back in. Note
also that this should probably be coupled with the user experience for
selecting the automatic start of an assistive technology when the
session starts.
5) Keep it off by default. Provide some sort of mechanism to start the
at-spi-registryd and another for GTK+ to retroactively load/enable ATK/GAIL.
Does that seem to cover where we are so far?
Will
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