Re: [g-a-devel]gnopernicus robustness and a11y tools in the GNOME2.2 release

[Bill Haneman <bill haneman sun com>]

On Thu, 2002-08-29 at 13:22, Michael Meeks wrote:
> Hi Glynn,
> 
> 
> 	The vast majority of the setup problems I believe are trivially caught
> and fixed at runtime - by decent exception handling and flagging like:
> 
> 	"I couldn't activate the gnome-speech backend, this is probably
> 	 because it's not installed in the right place; the exception
> 	 was 'unknown component OAFIID:Foo/Bar'".
> 
> 	etc. It seems gnopernicus churns lots of debug messages of the form:
> 
> 	"Succeeded in setting up minor component a"
> 
> 	but not things like
> 
> 	"Totally failed to activate sound backend because ..."

This is a very good point.  All joking about volunteers aside ;-), there
are two places where our assistive technologies need documentation help
(and I am including runtime diagnostics, perhaps irrationally, in my
broad definition of 'docs'):

*	how to configure/troubleshoot the AT;

* 	how to use the AT, assuming it's basically working.

There are some efforts underway in the second category for gnopernicus,
I think, but even if the developers at BAUM who are doing the lion's
share of the work feel that they can't produce "product-level" user docs
in English, any documentation (no matter how informal) that they can
provide about running gnopernicus will be much appreciated and go a long
way towards the creation and refinement of user docs.

We need help in the first category as well, and I would suggest that if
we can create a "seed document", perhaps cobbled together from mailing
list discussions/assistance, then subsequent people who try to use those
documents as a starting point can correct and refine that document.

At the moment I believe the best documentation in both categories is the
Gnopernicus README file, which does describe the use of a number of
features and I believe contains a small bit of troubleshooting info as
well.

Perhaps a TROUBLESHOOTING file could be added to cvs, as a start, and/or
installed as a man page or other GNOME-2 yelp document?

-Bill

> > Is that possible? since otherwise I somewhat regret to think that no one
> > will test it or get interested in it :/
> 
> 	Ultimately if hackers find it hard - users find it impossible; and
> there is no excuse for bad runtime diagnostics.
> 
> 	Regards,
> 
> 		Michael.
> 
> -- 
>  mmeeks gnu org  <><, Pseudo Engineer, itinerant idiot
> 
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