Re: [orca-list] Accessibility Testing in Ubuntu 12.04

[Jason White <jason jasonjgw net>]

Thomas Ward <thomasward1978 gmail com> wrote:
> Yeah, that's a tough one. I think what you are doing is probably the
> best approach right now. Just filing a bug report on launchpad isn't
> enough. The Youtube videos accurately demonstrates the problems all of
> us are having with Unity and Orca and shows the Unity developers
> exactly what is broken and what needs to be fixed. It explains the
> problem in more detail than any written bug report I've ever read.

Many of these desktop projects apparently don't have good, automated
regression testing that covers the accessibility implementation. I've been
looking at the Chromium sources (for other reasons), and I've noticed that
they have tests which will render various Web pages and write out the tree of
accessible objects, then compare this with the correct output.

Proper test cases that exercise components of the user interface and check the
"accessible" objects would catch many errors immediately before users ever
encounter them.
> However, I've never understood why Cononical decided to dump Gnome in
> favor of Unity in the first place. There doesn't seem to be any
> advantage in Unity over Gnome, and in fact for those of us with
> disabilities it has made matters much worse, because we have to
> install a system where everything is broken and then attempt to
> install Gnome, configure it to login by default, just to get a usable
> GUI. 

I don't know what the reasons were, but Shuttleworth et al., decided to write
their own alternative to Gnome-Shell instead of contributing to Gnome 3. If
you don't like it, you can always switch to a different distribution or
install Gnome packages for Ubuntu.

People have been writing alternative desktop environments and window managers
for as long as I can remember. This isn't a recent trend - it's business as
usual in the free and open-source software world. Often, this is how
innovation arises: a group of developers or an organization decides to write
its own instead of acquiescing in the priorities and technical decisions of an
existing project. It's the same with shells, text editors, mail transfer
agents, Web browsers, and so on. At a certain point it's easier to take your
own direction than to settle for an unsatisfactory compromise with a project
that doesn't share your goals, preferences and priorities sufficiently.