Re: [orca-list] PolicyKit

[Calum Benson <Calum Benson Sun COM>]

On 29 May 2008, at 17:21, Rich Caloggero wrote:

> It seems to me that when there is an error condition, someone should  
> at
> least send a sound event or whatever the terminology is in gnome.  
> Seems like
> many people dont' use these, but they do exist and sound files can  
> be played
> when events occur.

This was one of my thoughts too, although I don't know what sort of  
shape the sound notification framework in GNOME is in right now.  Also  
of course, as noted, audio notification is necessary but not  
sufficient to make the error completely accessible.

> Also seems to me that when a dialog with static text appears,  
> especially if
> it appears due to an error condition, that the static text should be  
> read
> automatically by orca.

I seem to remember Gnopernicus did this for windows of type GtkAlert  
(or perhaps it was GtkMessageDialog in those days).  Of course, that  
doesn't help us here...

Without inventing something like a new text markup tag (or something)  
that causes text to be sent to ATs as the same time it's rendered to  
the screen, I suppose it's kind of hard for ATs to guess what else is  
important enough to read out immediately and what isn't, because  
pretty much every dialog contains some static text :/

Cheeri,
Calum.

> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Rich Burridge" <Rich Burridge Sun COM>
> To: "James Westby" <jw+debian jameswestby net>
> Cc: "Calum Benson" <Calum Benson Sun COM>; "orca-list" <orca-list gnome org 
> >
> Sent: Thursday, May 29, 2008 10:26 AM
> Subject: Re: [orca-list] PolicyKit
>
>
> Hi James,
>
> > Last week I was attending the Ubuntu Developer Summit, and we had
> > a session on PolicyKit with the author present. Someone in the
> > session said that it wasn't very clear when you had entered your
> > password incorrectly, as the dialog just shakes and clears the
> > input box. The author said this was clear enough.
>
> Heh. Hopefully he's been enlightened by now. :-)
>
> > I just read Rich Burridge's blog post on gnome-screensaver-dialog,
> > and it seems to confirm my suspicions that the policykit-gnome
> > dialog isn't accessible.
> >
> > I'm sorry to say that I know very little about accessibility, but I
> > would like to help change this. I think we should try and convince
> > the author to change the design first, but I would like some help
> > putting a proposal of what should happen together first.
>
> As you will have seen from my post, we have a workaround for now, so  
> things
> will hopefully be better for Orca in GNOME 2.24. We could probably  
> back-port
> this fix for Orca in GNOME 2.22.3.
>
> I suggest involving a good HCI designer in this. I've cc:'ed Calum. If
> he's not able to help, hopefully he'll know who will be.
>
> I'm not an HCI person myself, but it seems to me that just leaving the
> "Incorrect password" message there, and remove it the moment the user
> starts typing again, would really improve things for Orca users.  
> They'd
> use flat-review to explore the dialog and know what's there. That  
> should
> hopefully be a simple fix.
>
> But with a properly designed dialog, things can be a lot better.
>
> Thanks for your interest in this.
>
> > On top of this I would like someones idea of how accessible policykit
> > using applications are. Some applications (e.g. users-admin) grey out
> > most of the controls and place an unlock button on the dialog to make
> > them usable. Is it clear how the user should proceed when using orca?
> > Is there anything the applications could do to make it better, or is
> > this something that orca scripts would be written for?
> >
> > Thanks,
> >
> > James
> >
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > Orca-list mailing list
> > Orca-list gnome org
> > http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/orca-list
> > Visit http://live.gnome.org/Orca for more information on Orca
>
> _______________________________________________
> Orca-list mailing list
> Orca-list gnome org
> http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/orca-list
> Visit http://live.gnome.org/Orca for more information on Orca

--
CALUM BENSON, Usability Engineer       Sun Microsystems Ireland
mailto:calum benson sun com            GNOME Desktop Team
http://blogs.sun.com/calum             +353 1 819 9771

Any opinions are personal and not necessarily those of Sun Microsystems