Re: [orca-list] Accessibility of apps

[Tom Masterson <kd7cyu gmail com>]

Not only do we need to be able to find a way to fund delelopment to 
retroactively put in accessibility but we need to do something to train 
developers to consider accessibility from the very beginning of a project. 
It is much easier to uild it in from the ground up but it is not something 
most developers even consider as it is not something they are exposed to 
on a daily basis.  What would help tith this would be if the tools used to 
design and build apps would put in at least basic accessibility even if 
the developer did ot think about it.  That was one of the very few good 
things that visual studio did (when I still worked in windows and did 
development) was automatically fill in what it could glean from an object 
while you wre creating it and fill in some of hte accessibility pieces. 
It may not have been the most descriptive but at least it was a start.

Tom

On Tue, 23 Feb 2016, Luke Yelavich wrote:

> Before I continue, I would like to stress that the opinion expressed here are mine alone, and not those of my 
> employer Canonical Ltd.
>
> On Sun, Feb 21, 2016 at 05:42:24AM AEDT, Jason White wrote:
> > I think it will require a dedicated group of people who are comfortable with
> > accessibility APIs and who can look at a project's source code, identify the
> > cause of a bug and fix it quicker than the project's own developers can. A bug
> > report can then be submitted with a patch that fixes it. The project's
> > maintainers can help to improve the patch, but the point is to provide a patch
> > which has been tested as a starting point, not just a bug report.
>
> I totally agree with this. I'd add that this extends to any extra frameworks
> required by the assistive technology, such as Speech Dispatcher and
> BrlTTY. Those frameworks work well enough now, but there is much that
> could be done to both to make the experience much better for users.
>
> > I think there's more than enough money being made from Linux to finance what
> > I've just described, and there might also be willing volunteers who can
> > assist. I would have expected the regulatory situation to have prompted Linux
> > distributors to pool their resources in this area and to dedicate effort to
> > it, but it hasn't happened yet, presumably because we haven't seen any
> > litigation yet. Is that what it's going to take? I hope not, but I fear it
> > might be.
>
> I fear this also. Linux/FOSS accessibility is only going to get better
> if there is significant funding behind it. Yes, those of us who know how
> things work could be paid to work on things, but there are only a few of
> us, and to make significant progress, we would need to bring in developers
> and teach them how things work, and this would likely require financial
> insentive for them to work on something they otherwise may not be interested
> in working on. My first thought would be other GNOME developers, since
> they have a good understanding of GObject, and given good documentation,
> would then be able to contribute good accessibility fixes. There is also
> Qt, and the relatively young Linux accessibility support there, which also
> needs work, which could be best solved by those who are most familiar with
> Qt and its inner workings, given it has to provide accessibility support
> for 5 platforms.
>
> Luke
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