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Statement On Desktop Accessibility Development

Submitted by stro on Fri, 2005-09-23 10:07. Gnome Accessibility
Gnome Accessibility

We are members of the Gnome and KDE Accessibility Projects, and also of the Free Standards Group's Accessibility Workgroup (FSG Accessibility). We have prepared this statement in order to clarify the plans and intentions of our projects with respect to interoperability and standardization. We believe this statement accurately reflects the consensus viewpoint of the individual members of our groups.

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Could get Gnopericus Working by Anonymous George

Blind People Unheeded?

Submitted by Anonymous George on Sat, 2005-09-24 15:33.

Been going through the public comments made in regards to the Commonwealth of Massachusetts' choice to standardize on OpenDocument. One of the often recurring comments there come purportedly from blind people or organizations which represent blind people and they make insinuations ranging from Windows / MS Office are the only programs which allow blind readers to read documents to other software developers having no support whatsoever for Braille interpreters.

What's the current state of Accessibility on Gnome apps and OpenOffice.org and why are they making statements like that?

Hard to put figures on this

Submitted by Anonymous George on Sun, 2005-09-25 15:55.

Hard to put figures on it, but most GNOME apps, plus OpenOffice.org and Mozilla 1.7, are 'mostly' accessible at this point. Sun in particular are still actively working on improving the accessibility of the latter two apps, on both *nix and Windows.

Most GNOME apps are fairly usable by blind users (using gnopernicus, which supports text-to-speech and some braille devices) out of the box, because of the accessibility stuff that's built into gtk. Complex apps like Evolution do still rely somehwat on the developers to 'finish the job' properly, particularly if they use custom widgets, but it's my impression that not enough developers know (or perhaps care) enough about how to do this yet. If anything, though, the main problem is that gnopernicus itself still seems to be quite difficult to configure, and rather unstable.

Users with limited motion or vision, though, are in better shape-- the magnifier part of gnopernicus seems to work quite well. And the GNOME on-screen keyboard, GOK, is stable, and offers more features than anything that's readily available on Windows.

So, Windows might still be ahead of the game, but the *way* GNOME handles accessibility should make it possible for us (and soon, KDE) to continue to catch up fairly quickly.

Interestingly inaccessible by Anonymous George
Re: Interestingly inaccessible by Anonymous George

You know, the web page is

Submitted by kerrick on Fri, 2005-09-23 13:02.

You know, the web page is still fine in screen readers and text-only browsers. A badly coded page does not imply an unusable page: valid != accessible

The test it fails is a test by Anonymous George

Interestingly enough, the

Submitted by kerrick on Fri, 2005-09-23 17:53.

Interestingly enough, the test conducted wasn't event the accessibility test, which is passes, maybe...

So, what you're saying is

Submitted by kerrick on Fri, 2005-09-23 17:49.

So, what you're saying is that the test could not be conducted because the page is invalid, so the state of accessiblity is up for grabs:

accessible = maybe;
if (valid)
{
if (good) accessible = true; else accessible = false;
}

While I agree that it is better for sites to be valid than not, I would argue that a site does not have to be valid to be accessible to users. Accessibility is more of a structural thing than a syntax thing, unless the browser is unable to handle invalid pages. (If there is a browser for the disabled that cannot, I would like to know about it.)