a11y menu access (was Re: Features !)

[Piñeiro <apinheiro igalia com>]

Changing subject. As Matthias said, this is somewhat off-topic, as the
original thread was about start to propose features.

On 10/06/2011 01:50 PM, Alan Cox wrote:
>> Someone said, "well, if it is my house, I should be able to chose", the
>> reason that rationale doesn't work is because the GNOME Shell experience
>> should be designed to be inclusive, so this is really closer to an office
>> building or an apartment building instead of a private house.
> The flaw in your logic starts beyond the front door. Clearly the login
> process should be accessible, and the install and setup so that a user
> can always get their system set up.
>
> However at the point beyond login that ceases to be true. It's necessary
> that the accessibility starts available somewhere (or can be enabled
> accessibly in the login) but beyond that point the user should be able to
> disable it for their account.

Things are not as easy as that. In some cases accessibility is not just
about disable/enable something, and some disabled users doesn't need a
specific feature always.

For example, although some users are used to use magnification, they
don't need it to login. Related to that, Joseph Scheuhammer is working
on the UI to configure the zoom, and also provide brightness/contrast
effects, with a high control on his configuration, as not all the users
needs the same value (he is planning to propose that as a 3.4 feature
btw). Users could use a contrast configuration, but then decide to
change it. Having the menu access allow users to access that part easily.
>
> If someone needs accessibility to use my account then probably I've been
> hacked by someone disabled. Granted it could be I have become disabled
> but that hopefully doesn't happen to people suddenely very often. Sure
> it'll happen slowly by age to many of us. Also if you can force
> accessibility on as a login choice that is still ok.

As I said, IMHO, we can't force the user to configure all the aspects of
accessibility at login time. If not, he will require to logout if he
want to change something. And this is something that we can say about
any other session configuration.

As you mention "it'll happen slowly by age", I will give another
example. Magnifiers are heavily used by old people. But this is not
usually a "all or nothing" situation. They can interact with the
computer, but if they start to feel tired, they can decide to start the
magnifier.

>
> It seems to me you can meet both sets of requirements quite easily, and
> that an always accessible login with the ability to force a session to be
> accessible covers the corner cases too.

I made some examples that I guess you include on "the corner cases".
IMHO, is making things more complex.

In my personal opinion, a11y menu access should be there by default, but
I don't see any problem to provide a way to hide it.

BR


-- 
Alejandro Piñeiro Iglesias