Re: [orca-list] Improving application and desktop accessibility

[Jason White <jason jasonjgw net>]

Piñeiro <apinheiro igalia com> wrote:
> On 09/06/2011 09:01 PM, Thomas Ward wrote:
> > 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.
>
> There are already people doing that work, and we meet each week in order
> to check for the status of those projects:
> https://live.gnome.org/Accessibility/Minutes
I know, but we need more of them. For example, as far as I can tell,
LibreOffice accessibility under ATK/AT-SPI isn't being looked after currently;
Mozilla could benefit from more work in this area as well. On the positive
side, WebKit and (along with it) Chromium are on the move, so the news isn't
entirely negative.
> > 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.
>
> And all those people was trying to get the accessibility status of GNOME
> 3.0 to be the best as possible:
>
> https://live.gnome.org/Accessibility/ThreePointZero
>
> And said so, we, the people that are usually on those meetings, we are
> aware that GNOME 3.0 accessibility status was bad. But the main reason
> is that there is a lot of work to do, there isn't too many people, and
> most of the people are volunteers. 

Exactly, and that's why I'm reluctant to join the chorus of dissatisfaction
that sometimes, understandably, emerges on this list.

Would it be possible to encourage the people who are making the changes to the
applications and the desktop enviornments to support the accessibility APIs
properly while making those improvements elsewhere? Surely the accessibility
shouldn't be left to a handful of specialists in each project (and I'm not
claiming that this is the case now with Gnome or other projects - I don't want
to be drawn into a discussion of past practice at this point). For example,
suppose there were an expectation of accessibility assessment as part of the
normal regression testing and evaluation that takes place whenever rewrites or
changes are proposed for acceptance, with accessibility "specialists"
available to help with issues that arise. Of course, this also means that
patch reviewers would need to be familiar with accessibility APIs, at least
for assessing code that touches the user interface.

Of course, whatever else happens, there is a need for more resources; that
much is undeniable.