Re: An Open Letter to Oracle on the Topic Of Accessibility

[Nolan Darilek <nolan thewordnerd info>]

On 02/20/2010 11:46 PM, Kenny Hitt wrote:
> Hi.  In my view, Gnome accessibility will never succeed.  It will sometimes get close, but will
> never make it all the way.
> ...
> In the Apple approach, apps are required to be accessible before being included in the operating system.
>    

So they've fixed the dev tools, then? Because in my years of development 
under OS X, I was stuck using it as a glorified text console as various 
aspects of XCode weren't accessible.

What about multitrack recording under GarageBand? For years after the 
introduction of VoiceOver GarageBand was mostly unusable. Then you 
finally gained the ability to press record and stop, but not to 
multitrack. And I was using VO from a pre-release 10.4 ISO, disheartened 
to learn that many of the apps I wanted to use (including iTunes at that 
time) weren't accessible to me. Some stuff changed when I snagged 
another 10.5 release, but not as much as I'd have wished. I can't go any 
higher because my current mac is PPC, though I do hear that 10.6 finally 
got continuous read functionality on webpages. Also, is Safari 
supporting ARIA these days?

Don't misunderstand me. I'm not trying to start a GNOME vs. OS X 
flamewar. I'm not claiming that one is better, nor will I participate in 
any discussions of that sort. I, too, am disturbed at what is happening 
in the GNOME accessibility community and worry about the breaking 
changes that come down the pipeline. But I had two issues with this message.

One is that I think it is disinformation to claim that OS X apps are 
"required" to be accessible before inclusion in the OS. Unless something 
has changed in the last few years, that's certainly not the case. 
Granted, Apple has made a great commitment to accessibility, and I 
commend them for that even if I don't agree with much of their ideology, 
but just as with GNOME, Apple breaks things too.

Second, I think it's a very gloomy, pessimistic and vague view. What 
does it mean to "make it all the way?" Can you point out some examples 
of some entities who have so we have a goal to shoot for? I assert that 
Apple isn't, and I think we both assert that neither are GNOME or 
Microsoft. To whom should we look for examples?

> This mail was written on a Linux box in the text console.  Gnome 2.28 just isn't worth the frustration to try posting it under Gnome.
>
>    
Sorry to hear that it's so difficult for you. This mail was written in a 
Thunderbird window running under GNOME. Earlier today I was writing 
Scala code in one window, watching Jetty server logs in another and 
reloading the accessible AJAX-driven web app I'm developing in Firefox. 
Late last week I was doing much the same, only running the Android 
emulator and developing my Android screen reader. I also used OpenOffice 
many times for various freelance writing gigs, Rhythmbox for 
podcatching/music playback... I'm curious to know what issues you're 
having with GNOME that make it so vastly difficult in your situation, 
and wish you the best of luck at resolving them should that be your desire.

Take care.