Re: Can the community work with Gnome to improve GTK+ a11y?

[Bill Cox <waywardgeek gmail com>]

I agree about the combo box navigation.  That bothers everyone I
suspect, not just the blind.  While it's obviously open to debate, I
think greyed out menu items should be spoken when we auto-skip over
them, so users know they are there without having to enter flat review
on a menu item.  Do I understand correctly that they currently aren't
available through at-spi?  If so, any fix will probably require a
patch to the menu code in either gail or GTK+.  Now that gail is part
of GTK+, does that mean Li has more authority to fix bugs in GTK+?
This sounds like Li's sort of thing to me, though I'd be happy to dive
into the code and see what's up.

I'll post to the usability list and see what happens.

Thanks,
Bill

On 1/1/12, Joanmarie Diggs <jdiggs igalia com> wrote:
> Hey Bill.
>
> Regarding this one:
>
>> - Menus that are greyed out seem to not exist for screen reader users.
>
> Well, in terms of navigation, they don't exist for anyone. I see them,
> but I can't get at them physically. Whether or not greyed-out menus and
> menu items should be navigable by all users is a question for the Gtk
> developers.
>
> The fact that Orca should present greyed-out menus and menu items but
> fails to do so is nonetheless a valid concern. Given that Orca's normal
> mode of operation is to present the focused item as the user interacts
> with it, and given that these creatures are (at the moment) not
> focusable items, I think the most appropriate means to make these items
> "exist" for screen reader users would be via Flat Review since that's
> the "what's visible on the screen" mode. I've just opened the following
> bug against Orca and will try to address it in the very near future:
> https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=667087
>
>> - Navigation of combo boxes is difficult for screen reader users, who
>> expect to be able to type the first letters of an entry and move to it
>> directly,
>
> For what it's worth, this bothers me too. It's a long way down to "New
> York" (aka Eastern Time). Seems this bothers other users as well. See
> for instance: https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=643853
>
> In my opinion, the above two issues are issues which impact all users
> and just so happen to bite users who are blind or visually impaired even
> harder. Therefore, I wonder if the thing to do is not treat them as
> "accessibility" issues, but instead as "usability" issues. There's a
> list for that: https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/usability.
>
> Take care.
> --joanie
>
>