Re: RFP - Guadalinex a11y edition

[Bill Cox <waywardgeek gmail com>]

Outstanding!  Comments below.

On Thu, Jun 10, 2010 at 8:36 AM, Mario <mariocs gmail com> wrote:
> 1. How should the environment be at startup in order to be the most
> inclusive?

Magnification and speech should be enabled by default.  We've settled
on a 14-point font in Vinux, as there are problems with many dialogs
if you go larger.  Orca comes up, and users can type Orca+g to start
the magnifier.  We also have a keybinding to switch to the Compiz
desktop, which has a far better magnifier, as well as highly useful
features like window negation.

Open-source speech recognition isn't good enough yet to be useful,
IMO.  If that changes, you'd want that, too.  I don't think we need
good continuous voice recognition at first.  What we really need is
the equivalent of the old Dragon Dictate, something that could be used
to select emacs macros and control the Gnome desktop through
gnome-voice-control.  If an hour or two of voice training is required,
it's no big deal.

There is a pretty cool app called Dasher that can help people who can
point but not type enter text fairly fast.

> 2. How should be enabled/disabled the different options? by keystrokes? by
> mouse movements? by voice orders?

I feel pretty strongly that there should be default keybindings in
Gnome to do two things: enable screen reader, and enable magnifier.
Once you enable either mode, a bunch of other bindings can be enabled.
 Orca puts them all on the Caps-Lock key.  Compiz uses the Super (Win)
key.  This way, people with visual impairments can sit down at a Gnome
desktop and get started right away.

There are difficulties implementing this.  In particular,
at-spi-registryd needs to be enabled by default.  Unfortunately, it
still is a bit buggy, and applications slow down, even if there's no
screen reader running.  Also, Compiz needs decent graphics hardware,
and many machines can't run it properly.  The Gnome magnifier can
still be used in this case through Orca.

> 3. How should be the user informed of the different options? audio?
> audio+text?

If you install Ubuntu Lucid, you'll see that the Live CD boots into a
GTK based windowing environment, where it asks for your language and a
couple other things.  I would like a screen reader running at this
screen, as well as magnification, and I would like to add a menu for
accessibility options.  There should also be something for people who
can point, but not type.

> 4. Anything else you think is important to include
> The planned release date for this a11y edition is november 2010.

Then you're already behind schedule!

> Just for your information, the current developments that we're funding or
> planning to fund and that will be included in this a11y edition, along with
> all other GNOME 3.0 a11y applications, are:

I might add one more application: Firefox.  Right now, there are at
least 10 significant a11y related Firefox bugs, and Firefox is easily
the most important desktop application to blind users, since most
other applications have good command-line equivalents.  I also am
tempted to recommend Thunderbird improvements.  It seems to be the
e-mail client of choice right now for the blind, but it still has many
problems.

Bill