Re: [orca-list] Possibly Forking Gnome 2

[Thomas Ward <thomasward1978 gmail com>]

Jason wrote:

There needs to be a group of people who are familiar with the ATK/AT-SPI
technology, and whose job it is to work with various projects (desktop
environments and applications) to maintain and improve their accessibility
support, and to improve the release processes to avoid regressions.

Agreed. Not much use in upgrading if the desktops and apps begin
breaking accessibility as we've seen recently with Gnome 3 vs Gnome
2.32. Someone has to watch dog the accessibility while the desktop or
app is in development/testing else the end result will be a stable
release with infurior accessibility. Something like this issue with
the now infamous f2 problem in Gnome 3 could have been caught and
fixed long ago if it had been in the hands of some accessibility watch
dogs prior to the Gnome 3 official release.
My own interest is in other approaches to accessibility that don't involve
significant modifications to the source code of applications. For example,
Emacspeak works by using the extension language of Emacs (in which much of
Emacs itself is written) to provide a spoken interface; ChromeVox takes a
similar approach, with only minor modifications to the browser that can be
subjected to automated testing.

Um...Sometimes that works sometimes not. I think a wholistic
accessibility approach is doing what we are doing with Gnome and what
Apple is doing with their own accessibility efforts with Cocoa. If we
build accessibility into GTK+, QT, and document how GAIL, ATK, and
At-Spi can be integrated into a desktop application accessibility can
be pretty much assured from the outset. Its simply a matter of making
accessibility a core part of the development framework for desktop
applications and write it into the standard API documentation for
mainstream and accessibility devs alike. In other words to me
accessibility isn't something that can simply be bolted on, but should
be at the core of every API and toolkit from the beginning.

Cheers!