Re: [orca-list] Let's celebrate! Red hat has hired a blind person to improve accessibility!

[Colomban Wendling <cwendling hypra fr>]

Le 28/06/2022 à 00:21, Kyle via orca-list a écrit :
> […]
>
> Actually, making things work more like HTML in a web browser is probably 
> a better option. Notice how accessible HTML is right out of the box, and 
> it takes breaking things to break things. For example, I had to do very 
> little to make my website work. It took more effort to make it look good 
> than to make a screen reader read it well. I wish the same for any OS, 
> but many seem to make accessibility rather esoteric, or even occult for 
> many developers instead of making it the default behavior. Developers 
> should not be required to learn tons of extra stuff just to make their 
> applications work with screen readers, and accessibility should be core 
> default functionality, not a bolt-on or an afterthought that requires 
> much training and testing in order to get right from an application 
> developer's standpoint. Yeah, maybe this is perfect world stuff, but we 
> do have the ability, since everything in Linux is open source, to solve 
> this problem once and for all from the ground up.

In theory this sounds right, but there's one thing not to forget: 
websites are usually mostly text, while applications are usually mostly 
controls.  It's very easy to get text to read properly, but it's harder 
to get controls to do so, for example that's where you need proper 
labeling and relations to be comfortable to use -- and that's not that 
hard to screw up in HTML as well.

And actually, even if things could possibly still be improved, GTK is 
supposed to do most of the work for you, even for relations: for 
example, it'll set up the a11y relations for you if you create a 
relation for keyboard activation (e.g. if you can select a control with 
e.g. Alt+A, it'll make the relation between the label describing it and 
the control available) -- basically similar to HTML's <label>: if you 
have the proper "label-for" or hierarchy, you get semantics that get 
presented, otherwise you don't.

It gets trickier when applications use specialized (custom) controls, 
and that's usually where the developers have to do a more little work 
for accessibility to work properly.

Anyway I agree that a11y should not be an afterthought, but for this it 
basically has to get widespread acknowledgment, and authors to be aware 
and educated about it.  Just as with HTML, you'll have to set *some* 
ARIA information in most websites for optimal results, and that's only 
gonna happen if authors are aware of what they should do, and how to do 
it.  So educating developers *is* important, even if not necessary for 
the simplest apps to work.

Regards,
Colomban