Re: [orca-list] Making Ubuntu Software Center accessible

[Ignasi Cambra <ignasicambra gmail com>]

The problem is that accessibility is not always taken seriously outside accessibility departments, meaning 
that, for example, as much as some people in Canonical truly care about making Ubuntu an accessible 
distribution, others let a completely inaccessible version of Yelp and this Ubuntu software center thing make 
it into newer releases of the product. Until people understand the importance that accessibility has for 
people who need products to be accessible, these things will keep happening. If this software center had 
other problems or incompatibilities it would not be part of Ubuntu. But it is inaccessible, and it still is a 
part of the system.
On Feb 18, 2010, at 1:50 PM, Hugh Sasse wrote:

> I think there's a more fundamental question here.  That is:
> "Why are people still developing inaccessible software?"
>
> The Americans With Disabilities Act dates back nearly two decades,
> the UK legislation is about 15 years old, and that's just the legal
> side of things, ignoring culture.  So why aren't people catching up
> with this?
>
> I think there are a number of answers to this, but they include
>
> *  Much of the information out there is about available applications
>    and configuring them by/for the disabled user
>
> *  There would seem to be nothing in the acceptance process which means
>    that inaccessible applications are rejected for inclusion in
>    GNU/Linux.  [I don't know enough about that to be certain...]
>
> *  A quick search shows little for the programmer along the lines of
>    how to make your application accessible.  I found Accerciser through
>    http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/9991
>    but good though that is, it is rather "after the event", as opposed
>    to how to write in accessibility from the start.
>
> *  Much of the material is pretty intimidating for someone starting out
>    in terms of the number of things you have to cover.  Just taking
>    vision: speech access, braille access, large print access, the needs
>    of colour blind people, be that red/green, blue/yellow, or total
>    colour blindness.  [Then there's deafblindness...]
>
> *  The wider case for accessibility doesn't seem to be put forward
>    enough.  Much is said about full participation of the whole of
>    society, but that won't get most people to jump at the chance to
>    add accessibility.  What seems to be left out is that something
>    accessible is usually easier to script with another technology,
>    because there are more hooks into it.  Textual interfaces can be
>    screen scraped easily, etc.
>
> A search for Accessibility Howto (a particularly blunt instrument for
> this sort of thing) only turns up this on the second page:
>
> http://www.faqs.org/docs/Linux-HOWTO/Accessibility-Dev-HOWTO.html
>
> and it is dated 2002, which is probably rather old now.
>
> I'd suggest that there is a need for people who know more about
> GNU/Linux accessibility than I do [1] to write about it for a wider
> audience to get the techniques out there.  "As a programmer this
> will benefit you, because you can do [...] as a result of the
> accessibility hooks being there."  Etc.
>
> I don't think the problems will start to go away until more people
> are aware of how easy the easy things are.  The difficult things 
> will come later.
>
>        Hugh
>
> [1] I don't know much about the programming of accessibility yet.
> I'm hoping this will change when (if?) I get more time.
>
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