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

[Shaun McCance <shaunm gnome org>]

On Tue, 2010-02-23 at 10:29 +0100, Halim Sahin wrote:
> Hi,
> Here are my notes on this topic:
> Sometimes I can understand the frustrations come up with
> gnome-accessibility.
> 
> Let me give you an example:
> It seems that yelp uses now webkit instead of gecko, which is realy bad
> for a11y.
> I have read some mail in orca/ubuntu list about yelp saying that this
> doesn't work with orca.
> Ok I am not sure if gecko can be selected by the distributors but such
> decisions will break a11y on many distros.
> Webkit a11y isn't ready for enduser and the main help browser should not
> use it since it's ready to use with orca.
> When we have an unusable help system we make it really hard for not
> experienced users.

This is just not true.  The Yelp you get from gnome.org is
based on Gecko.  There is an experimental webkit branch in
git.  There have never been any releases from that branch.
Despite this, Debian (and therefore Ubuntu) decided to roll
their own WebKit-based Yelp releases.

I take accessibility very seriously.  I've had conversations
with Willie about how we can further improve Yelp for people
using accessible tools.  We've talked about the accessibility
impact of our new help format, Mallard.  And I've had lots of
conversations with various people about producing better help
about accessibility.

If there's more I can do, please let me know.  But I'm one of
the developers that's firmly committed to accessibility, and
I'm a bit tired of being made out as the bad guy just because
Debian doesn't follow my releases.

--
Shaun