Re: [orca-list] Most accessible IDE for java

[Krishnakant <krmane openmailbox org>]

On Wednesday 21 December 2016 08:10 PM, Eric Johansson wrote:
> On 12/20/2016 11:39 AM, Tom Masterson wrote:
> > To make accessibility universal there are a couple of things that need
> > to happen.
> >
> > 1.  We need to make it part of the education system and start teaching
> > it's importance and how to do it as part of coding classes.  It is not
> > taught and therefore not even thought of by most developers.
> >
> > 2.  Make it easy if not almost automatic so that developers don't have
> > to spend extra time adding it.  Especially when using an IDE it should
> > automatically add at least some form of accessibility items even ...
> I think this model of accessibility is fundamentally flawed.
>
> I'm not visually impaired, my hands don't work right and I use speech
> recognition. If you think support for visually impaired users is bad,
> there is nothing for speech recognition users.
>
> My experience building my own speech interfaces has led me to believe
> that trying to maintain a GUI with the lumps on the side for
> text-to-speech or speech recognition support is completely flawed. Our
> user experiences have almost nothing to do with how you represent
> information on the screen.
>
> A button, visually, something you press. From general user experience
> perspective, it's "something you can do". To build good interfaces for
> likes of us, we need to know and to be able to drive the interface from
> the "what you can do" level, not from knowing there is a green oval with
> the word "drink me" on it.
>
> The engineering/technology change (and maybe legislative) is that all
> applications should provide an API/micro services interface that exposes
> all of the things you can do with the application to build the user
> interface. For example, the GUI would be a separate URI from the
> text-to-speech or speech recognition interface. But it should be
> possible to run all interfaces in parallel so that you can listen to the
> system's response to what I've said.
>
> Part of the reason why I advocate for this approach comes my
> observations that people with working hands and eyes can't even produce
> a good GUI interface. How could you expect them to produce a good
> accessibility interface when they have no experience with how
> disabilities affect one's ability to use a computer.
>
> Another reason why I advocate for the micro services model is that I
> want to have one box with all of my speech controls with me and any
> system I use becomes automatically accessible just by connecting in my
> little accessibility system. You don't make every system accessible by
> loading down accessibility tools. You make systems accessible by
> providing an interface usable by another machine.
>
> The year or two ago I did an experiment with the Windows VM running
> NaturallySpeaking driving the host machine (Linux). It works rather
> well. I didn't have enough time, money or energy to build a full
> accessibility framework but it gave me good enough results that I think
> it's worth exploring further.
>
> Slightly shifting, I find the topic of making eclipse accessible
> interesting. I've been exploring programming using speech recognition
> for way too many years. Progress has been hampered by the almost
> completely orthogonal needs of a disabled user versus a tab user. From a
> speech recognition perspective, the interface needs logical elements,
> not characters. For example, I want to be able to change the second
> argument or navigate to the next predicate, not move over 20 characters
> then delete the next six characters. I suspect a similar UX change would
> help visually impaired users as well.
>
> So while I appreciate the work that folks have put into the various
> accessibility toolkits, I think the toolkits should be thrown away
> because they exclude a whole class of accessibility needs and they are,
> quite frankly a dead-end solution because they don't provide the
> information accessibility solutions need.
Yes from your perspective where there are different requirements and 
paradimes, you are absolutely correct.
Of course current systems have few big advantages.
I have to work with my sighted colleagues day in and day out.
I have to exactly point out things to them graphically or you may say 
the way they see it visually.
I must talk about buttons, dropdowns etc and the events which sighted 
users encounter.
So the current system does have it's own place.
Happy hacking.
Krishnakant.