Re: [g-a-devel] Status of IBM a11y

[Jacob Beauregard <jake13jake comcast net>]

On Saturday 02 June 2007 15:57:59 Deborah Norling wrote:
> Peter comments:
> >Separate from all that, as someone who has been part of the GNOME and
>
> OpenOffice.org accessibility efforts since >their beginning (and part of
> the Mozilla accessibility effort since the start of the UNIX portion of
> it), I very >much welcome any suggestions you have for what I and Sun can
> do to further help bring more developers from a
>
> >wider spectrum of organizations into our community.
>

While screenreaders that can recognize different xml tags are useful to some 
extent, a screenreader that knows what to say about a web page by context 
would probably be better for the people that are using it. This is an example 
problem. People don't always care to solve problems, no matter how 
interesting (as in the example) that won't affect them either way.

I don't believe that many people will help in developing something that they 
or someone they know isn't going to use. The problem to drawing interest to 
accessibility would be to promote technology in a sense that it will not only 
help disabled users, but also be something that anyone would use.

Take electronic books for example. Almost no one would think to read a book 
via their monitors. That's one of the biggest reason books haven't 
drastically changed mediums into electronic form. The light of a monitor is 
too intense for most people who read books, and that's a problem of its own. 
However, if a user had the book read to them by a screenreader instead (and 
forgive me for suggesting a reduction of world-wide literacy), the chances 
that any user might use an electronic book greatly increases, and not just 
for the blind, who could alternatively use an electronic to braille 
translation. 

The problem here would be that screenreaders are typically monotone voices, 
with no variance drawn from context, and often fail in correctly pronouncing 
a word or a name. Therefore they're only useful to those who absolutely need 
them, and so usually minimum requirements are met with not many focusing on 
where else this technology could go. If the focus were switched from making a 
technology useful to few, and instead to many, it would probably help with 
the number of programmers wanting to work on it.

So yea, I don't think that disabled users developing for themselves is 
necessarily the most efficient solution. Of course you want to solve a 
problem for yourself, but really, get as many people as you can to want to 
solve it for their own purposes as well, including abled users. This would 
mean not stopping where it's good enough for yourself or others like you, but 
instead where it's good enough for everyone. It might take someone really 
clever to realize how to connect a technology intended for the disabled to 
make it useful for a larger population, but you could look at it as the 
design principles in reverse of how they're usually approached. i.e. 
designing something for a smaller population and making sure it fits the 
larger population in some way.

> Thirty years ago, as a promising young hackerette, I was offered a job at
> Dec which I declined.  They thought they were giving me a real opportunity
> -- a real corporate job.  I felt patronized -- like I would be the "token
> crip" probably stuck answering phones in the complaint department.
>
> But today, people see disabled teens as responsible and competent. And
> they'll work practically for free. Give some disabled teenagers
> internships, or competition for a coveted scholarship, and they will
> contribute more open-source code than those of us who now need a regular
> bedtime in order to function the next day at work.
>
> I wrote vast quantities of code in my younger years, for the shere pleasure
> of it, and had a corporation sponssored a contest where I could have
> entered that code, I would have tried very hard for the prize.
>
> One idea that fascinates me is having a kind of cross-polination; a blind
> guy writing a software tty for the deaf; a deaf lady coding a GPS app for
> the visually impaired.  Encouraging this would inspire young people to care
> about people with other disabilities who may not necessarily share their
> limitations , but do share their concerns.   And these young people would
> grow up to be leaders in disability organizations that would be open to
> changes outside the narrow political arena.
>
> --Debee
>
> _______________________________________________
> gnome-accessibility-list mailing list
> gnome-accessibility-list gnome org
> http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/gnome-accessibility-list