Re: yelp a11y for 2.28 (was Who is using WebKit in GNOME 2.28?)

[Willie Walker <William Walker Sun COM>]

Hi All:

Moving the discussion from desktop-devel-list to 
gnome-accessibility-list now that it has become more focused on specific 
accessibility tasks (the prior discussion was dealing with WebKit 
accessibility across the desktop).

Shaun has two main questions regarding the documentation:

> 1) We'd like to make the HTML output of our documentation
> better for screen readers, including having aural CSS rules
> if those would help.  But without accessibility experts, I'd
> just be guessing.

I'm not sure embedding ACSS (aural CSS) would be the right thing to do. 
 ACSS is more about providing a description of a voice, pitch, rate, 
etc., to be used.  For web content, this can conflict with a user's 
screen reader preferences.

However, having intimate knowledge of the content being provided and 
being able to provide suggestions for how it should be spoken is 
interesting.  For example, perhaps suggesting different voices for 
<code> or <pre> segments or different speaking rates for complex terms 
and phrases might be interesting.

Another alternative might be to convert the documents to DAISY format 
(http://www.daisy.org/) for use by DAISY readers.  This might be more 
achievable in the short term and might be more useful given that DAISY 
readers are designed to provide pretty efficient access to documents.

> 2) With the new topic-based Mallard help, it will be possible
> for us to tailor help to individual users better.  I'd like
> to talk to some accessibility people about what help topics
> we should provide for accessibility, and how we might be able
> to detect that users are using accessibility tools and make
> those topics more discoverable to those users.

Other than knowing a Mallard is a duck, I'm not familiar with Mallard at 
all (my apologies).  :-(

> Could we do an IRC meeting some time with my team and yours?
> Or perhaps we could have a face-to-face.  Will you be at the
> Boston Summit?

The a11y community tries to gather at 14:00UTC on Mondays in #a11y on 
irc.gnome.org.  I've been sloughing off on creating agendas lately since 
a lot of stuff is already in motion and few general 
discussions/directions need to be made right now.  Come on in to #a11y, 
however, and ping us if we're around.

Thanks Shaun!

Will

Shaun McCance wrote:
> On Sun, 2009-08-23 at 11:54 -0400, Willie Walker wrote:
> > Thanks everyone!  Based upon the responses, I think the gap that would
> > have no alternative accessible solution would be if yelp chose to ship
> > with a WebKit-only solution.
> >
> > The unfortunate thing about this is that yelp is quite important for our
> > users.  Many of them are coming to GNOME for the first time - some from
> > another platform and others because this is their first exposure to a
> > graphical desktop.  The documentation available via yelp helps these
> > users find their way through important information, such as keyboard
> > access, customization for fonts/colors/icons, how to use a specific
> > application, etc.
> >
> > Making documentation inaccessible or otherwise very difficult to obtain
> > is a serious regression.  It would be something that could potentially
> > keep new users away from GNOME and push existing ones back to the
> > platforms they came from.
> >
> > In other words, access to documentation is a critical component of the
> > GNOME platform.
> >
> > So...I'd like to appeal to the yelp developers to keep the accessible
> > solution turned on by default for 2.28 while we continue our work
> > towards WebKit a11y for GNOME 3.0.
>
> Done.  Yelp 2.28 will use Gecko.
>
> Willie, I have a number of documentation-related things I'd
> like to discuss with some accessibility experts.  Two things
> come to mind right now, but I know there's more:
>
> 1) We'd like to make the HTML output of our documentation
> better for screen readers, including having aural CSS rules
> if those would help.  But without accessibility experts, I'd
> just be guessing.
>
> 2) With the new topic-based Mallard help, it will be possible
> for us to tailor help to individual users better.  I'd like
> to talk to some accessibility people about what help topics
> we should provide for accessibility, and how we might be able
> to detect that users are using accessibility tools and make
> those topics more discoverable to those users.
>
> Could we do an IRC meeting some time with my team and yours?
> Or perhaps we could have a face-to-face.  Will you be at the
> Boston Summit?
>
> --
> Shaun
>
>
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