Re: [orca-list] OpenSolaris (was Re: An Open Letter to Oracle on the Topic Of Accessibility)

[Joanmarie Diggs <joanmarie diggs gmail com>]

On Thu, 2010-02-25 at 00:38 +0000, Michael Whapples wrote:

> Also, Joanie, I hadn't realised about the work done with the package 
> manager and accessibility, possibly a model of how accessibility in 
> applications can be done.

Indeed. It might be a logical interim step between where we are now and
where Will and others are trying to get us. Unless an app is truly
broken, I think it would be easy enough for a 'mainstream' developer
today to test their app with a screen reader and say "yup, it's talking,
and works with the keyboard, must be good" -- all the while failing to
notice an issue simply because they lack a complete understanding of how
users who are blind interact with software.

If each of us were to adopt our favorite piece of software from our
preferred distro/OS and find a way to give timely, practical feedback to
the developers -- ideally before a change was even committed -- I think
we'd prevent quite a few regressions and essentially be providing
further "training" (for lack of a better word) so that the developers
could spot more subtle accessibility and usability issues.

> (may be there's a way to get messages written to disk 
> and then recovered by booting a working BE, its sometimes just finding 
> these features if they exist).

Did you know that you can mount one BE from another and then examine the
typical linuxy log files? (e.g. /var/adm/messages, /var/log/Xorg.0.log,
etc.) I'll email you off-list.

--joanie