Universal Access icon

["William Jon McCann" <mccann jhu edu>]

Hi artists,

As some accessibility features become more integrated into our
platform and user interfaces the icon that represents them, naturally,
becomes more visible.  I think many of us have been vaguely unhappy
with the current  icon in the gnome-icon-theme [1].  It is a rendering
of the International Symbol of Access [2] which looks like this: ♿.
In practice, this is used primarily for mobility impairments. And as a
symbol of "Universal Accessibility" it is a little icky that it only
represents one type of impairment.

I discussed this briefly with Will Walker and some other members of
the a11y team and there seems to be significant agreement.  In fact,
Will himself decided to draw an icon to use on the team web pages [3].
 It looks like this:
http://live.gnome.org/Accessibility?action=AttachFile&do=get&target=logo.png
(As I understand it, efforts to move to this type of icon in the past
were bikeshedded to death)

It is clearly modelled on the icon used in OS X:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Universal_Access_icon.png

Vista uses a variation on the ISA:
http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/presskits/windowsvista/images/icons/EaseOfAccess.jpg


I think there is still a reason to keep the current "wheelchair" icon
in the icon theme but I propose that we replace the default icon for
preferences-desktop-accessibility with one that is more like the one
Will has drawn.  Anyone interested in giving this a shot?

Thoughts?

Thanks,
Jon


[1] http://svn.gnome.org/viewvc/gnome-icon-theme/trunk/scalable/apps/preferences-desktop-accessibility.svg?view=markup
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Symbol_of_Access
[3] http://live.gnome.org/Accessibility