Re: Reorganising accessibility features in gnome (suggestion)

[David Bolter <david bolter utoronto ca>]

Possibly orthogonal...

Maybe we need a wizard?

(Also, just a note that as decades pass there seems to be a 
movement/evolution of "assistive technology" features into mainstream 
use. I think we should encourage this wherever possible. It would be a 
shame to see a user leaning forward squinting because they haven't 
discovered an available preference. Anyway we can assist feature/tool 
'discovery' would be great.)

cheers,
D

Henrik Nilsen Omma wrote:

> 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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