Re: [Evolution-hackers] note on colorized calendars

[Anna Marie Dirks <anna ximian com>]

Luis:

We (meaning the Evolution development team) care just as much as you do
about making Gnome accessible. 

Please, rest assured that our intentions are to work within the
established accessibility guidelines (and the Human Interface
Guidelines) to make sure that Evolution is usable by everyone. 

Perhaps it would be helpful to try to keep in mind that the screenshot
you saw is just a sketch made by Tuomas to feel out an idea. It is
certainly not meant as a final, immutable solution. It would be a pity
if you read it as such. We have to start somewhere, and I am confident
that starting with Tuomas' idea is sound. 

On Wed, 2003-08-13 at 10:43, Ettore Perazzoli wrote:
> On Wed, 2003-08-13 at 08:57, Luis Villa wrote:
> Do you have any suggestions for fixing this?
> 
> >From a screen reader standpoint, it shouldn't matter since we can put
> the name of the calendar in the extra A11Y fields.

Information about how the Gnome Accessibility framework functions is
available online:
http://developer.gnome.org/projects/gap/GNOME-Accessibility.html is a
good place to start. The upshot of this information is that it is
possible to associate an accessibility-specific name and description
with each widget. This allows people who use screenreaders to hear some
data about each widget they interact with. (These are the extra a11y
fields that Ettore is alluding to above.)

Further, we have been working closely with Sun hackers from China to
make Evolution more accessible. Their experience with using the atk
framework will definitely help us to solve this problem. 

> For color-blind people, I am not sure...  We can make sure the stock
> colors have a reasonable amount of contrast differences and allow the
> user to configure different colors.  But I don't think we can use icons
> or other ways of identification, because they would make the UI ugly
> and/or more complicated.

Don't write off the possibility of adding the calendar name to each
event, or to using icons to differentiate between calendars. Your fear
about the ugliness or added complication of using labels/icons to this
end seems unfounded to me, Ettore. At the very least, we should give
Tuomas a chance to think about this possibility and try to work it into
his design.

If adding a label which tells you which calendar a given event belongs
to is this is the right thing to do for accessibility, then we'll do it.

On another note, you (as a QA person) should appreciate the value of
meticulous software testing, Luis. It should go without saying that new
designs like this will be anaylzed in our usability lab once we have a
skeleton of them in place. Further, thanks to Wipro's efforts, we now
have a plan for how to test Gnome applications for accessibility-- see
http://developer.gnome.org/projects/gap/testing/index.html . Finally, we
also have multiple colorblind developers here at Ximian, who are willing
to help us find a good solution to this problem.

So, yeah. Please have faith. 

Anna



-- 
Anna Marie Dirks <anna ximian com>