a11y questions for new module proposers...

[Willie Walker <William Walker Sun COM>]

Hi All:

Here's some really simple questions that all new module proposers should 
be able to answer for accessibility (note that this applies to things 
that expose a GUI).  It's not an exhaustive analysis by any means, but 
it will capture some of the most blatant failures.  It's so simple, even 
a caveman can do it.

1) Unplug your mouse.  Now, use your GUI via the keyboard alone.  Can 
you accomplish what you expect users to accomplish?

2) Go to System->Preferences->Appearance and select the high contrast 
large print inverse theme.  Do the colors, fonts, and font sizes change 
in your GUI?

3) Run accerciser.  Find your application in the left hand panel.  Does 
it appear in the list?  Look at the hierarchy via accerciser.  Does the 
hierarchy look complete?  It should mirror the GUI hierarchy.

4) Are you creating custom widgets?  If so, analyze them using 
accerciser.  You should be able to get textual equivalents for them 
using AT-SPI and accerciser will be able to show these to you.

5) For extra credit, run Orca and tab/arrow around your GUI.  Does Orca 
speak at least something when you move between objects?  It should at 
least kind of sound like it's telling you something meaningful about the 
object you landed on.

This is a very quick set of things YOU THE MODULE DEVELOPER can do as a 
very quick smoke test to evaluate your module.  You will be able to do 
it much faster than the a11y folks can do it because you already know 
how to build/install your module and all of the sundry of quirks and 
other dependencies needed to build it.

I'd bet that if you did the above, you'd be done 10x faster than it 
would take me to download your tarball, understand your build, gather 
all the dependencies for your tarball, understand their builds and 
depdendencies, and then work through all the patches and issues that 
you've already worked through, figure out what the heck it is that your 
module is supposed to be doing, etc.  :-)

Please take the time to do this for your modules and let us know how it 
works out.  We can then work with you to help you understand what is 
needed and how you can fix the problems.

Thanks!

Will