Re: [joanied gnome org: Re: Negativ Layout in Gnome 3]

[Matthias Clasen <matthias clasen gmail com>]

On Wed, Jun 1, 2011 at 7:40 AM, Piñeiro <apinheiro igalia com> wrote:
> On 06/01/2011 11:10 AM, Olav Vitters wrote:
>>
>> What is going on with Accessibility?
>>
>> - Accessibility
>>   → the feature will be completed the day we can enable a11y by default,
>>     probably not possible for 3.2, still the a11y team is working hard and
>>     tracking progress in
>> http://live.gnome.org/Accessibility/ThreePointTwo/
>
> FYI, this was the state also in GNOME 2.X. Not sure why suddenly the feature
> will be complete when this issue gets solved.
>
> Anyway, I agree that this is a really important feature.
>
>>     → remove from the features page
>
> Was done recently. FWIW, when I mentioned that on the weekly a11y meeting, I
> started to receive some personal messages (IRC+mail, yes, more than one),
> wondering if that means that GNOME didn't care about accessibility. Was hard
> to explain there wasn't any different on the plans to keep improving a11y,
> and that this change was just a coordination change. Some people felt that
> this change removed a lot of visibility of the accessibility work. I was
> also surprised that this change became so conflictive, although I agree
> about that this change makes accessibility a little less visible.

This may sound controversial, but here it goes:

I think we have to be honest about the fact that a11y is not a
first-class feature of GNOME until it is fully integrated. That means
being turned on by default, without making the desktop unusable. In my
opinion, the only way to get there is if the a11y team starts
perceiving itself as a part of GNOME, not as something that gets
'tacked on' from the side...

>From my perspective, the a11y team is far too happy to be inits own
little corner, working on its 'testing distro' and its own little
tools that need to work on every OS and thus end up working properly
on none of them. Yet, when I try to run accerciser in a jhbuild tree
on my system, it locks up solid after a few minutes every single
time...

Sorry for venting frustration here; I have been trying to push for a
change to this, by starting a drop-gail branch, and by asking Benjamin
to look at a11y issues in GTK+, but so far I have not seen any real
interest in it from the a11y side. The wiki page now says this about
gail/gtk: 'Wait for Benjamin to finish his work so we can test it'.
Things are not going to work like that....

I don't see many hopeful signs for a11y improving in 3.2 or 3.4.

Matthias