Reorganising accessibility features in gnome (suggestion)



Hello,

I have a comment about the way the Assistive Technology features are organised and presented in gnome (and a suggestion for improvement). This touches on a bit more than just the AT features themselves, so I should probably send this to some general gnome devel list as well (desktop-devel?).

The way accessibility features are managed in Gnome is a bit spread around ATM. In Ubuntu we are now writing some new software management tools which seem to spread things even more, at least in the short term. I think it might be time to consider unifying things a bit. Accessibility features can currently be altered in the following places (I'm using the Ubuntu menu structure names, but other Gnome systems will be similar):

1. System -> Preferences -> Assistive Technology Support

2. System -> Preferences -> Keyboard -> Accessibility ...

3. System -> Preferences -> Theme
 * For selecting high visibility themes

4. System -> Preferences -> Sound
 * For enabling visual feedback of system sounds

5. Application Install tool (+Synaptic)
* For actually installing the applications. In some cases you also need to run Synaptic or apt to install a dependency that is optional (like gnome-mag)

6. Applications -> Accessibility -> [app name]
* You may or may not need to start the application from here. In some cases it is set to start a boot (which is useful), but some do not have this option.

Possible solutions:

First, I would suggest collecting all the AT feature settings under one dialogue, the existing 'Assistive Technology Support'. This might require using tabs, as several other dialogues currently have.

Second, when an AT feature is enabled in this dialogue the user should be given the option to install the required packages directly. In Ubuntu, this currently happens with the 'Shared folders' utility, so the infrastructure is already there.

- Henrik




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