Re: [orca-list] Accessibility of apps

[Peter Vágner <pvdeejay gmail com>]

Hello,

When it comes to Audacity a few things I have noticed over the years and 
there is a bit of good news even recently.
The big news is that on jan 20 2016 version 2.1.2 has been released. In 
this version wxwidgets is upgraded from 2.8 to 3.0 which should 
hopefully address some of the accessibility issues on linux.
I have briefly tested this new update and some of the things appear to 
be addressed and some little ones are introduced.
For example radio buttons are now labelled on the selection toolbar. 
Unfortunatelly it is no longer possible to focus the control holding the 
length or a selection time value on the selection toolbar. This is a 
showstopper for me since I was used to having access to this control on 
windows.
The table holding list of tracks is not made accessible magically again 
on windows this is working.
Controls in the preferences dialog don't appear to be correctly labelled 
although I think it has been taken care of on Windows.
You know audacity accessibility hero used to be Dominic Mazzoni before 
he moved to Google and now there is a clever developer happy to address 
accessibility related issues Leland Lucius. A few years ago I can 
remember him discussing accessibility matters at the NVDA email list. 
Back in the days he was even using NVDA and jaws to compare how well 
audacity is working with both these.
I would say audacity developers are fine with listening and even doing a 
little on their own if they can address accessibility issues. 
Shortcomings we are seeing on linux are inherited from wxwidgets and 
lists, tables treeviews, spinners and other a bit complex controls don't 
have proper ATK support implemented at its side, so unless audacity guys 
have to take over wxwidgets or wxgtk or whatever, there is not much 
magic they are able to do.
I would say for a beginner developer making wxgtk more accessible would 
be a huge task.

Greetings

Peter

On 21.02.2016 at 21:49 B. Henry wrote:
> BTW, I like the idea of fixing audacity, and linphone.
> I mostly use the cli interface to linphone, but have had to write scripts to improve it/no accessability 
> issues there though. The GTK linphone interface
> is so close/would love to see it get where it should be.
> Rhythmbox some times seems hard to move around in, but I can't put exact issues in to words off the top of my 
> head as I don't use it much because of the
> issues I can't pstate very clearly at the moment.
> Gpodder: a fine program, under steady development/lead dev sounds like a nice guy. I wonder if there could be 
> an easy fix to the constant reporting of
> download progress that makes using the program once d-loads have started a pain, a few other things could be 
> done to improve its usability with Orca as
> well, but would need to spend some time with a sighted person wtching the screen to know how much can and 
> can't be accessed with a mouse at certain
> times as the interface is reported differently depending on whether or not updates have been just done or if 
> one has downloaded or otherwise interacted
> since last update check.
>