Re: [orca-list] FW: Orca - suggestions for the future!

["David E. Price" <deprice cs utah edu>]

On 02/06/2010 05:42 PM, David E. Price wrote:
> Hi,
>
> Just a couple of thoughts about contacting companies/software 
> development groups regarding accessibility.
>
> First and foremost, make it easy for them. If you are writing to 
> someone requesting that they make their 
> software/hardware/components/tools/widgets/etc. more accessible, you 
> should provide them with links to information that they can use to 
> learn how to make their product more accessible. I believe it was 
> within the last year that Will posted a list of these links to this 
> mailing list. I have a bunch of code to get working by Monday night, 
> so I don't have time at the moment to dig through the archives to find 
> the list of links. But, if no one can get it done by Tuesday, I'll 
> take a look then.
>
> Here is the message that Will sent to the list in early December:

One thing to do is to approach this from the user standpoint.

"I had my friend/wife/husband/son/daughter/cousin/etc. look at the 
screen for me. There is this component that has a drawing of a 
flashlight on it and it appears to be the only way to open the search 
dialog. Since the component doesn't seem to accept keyboard focus, it 
seems as though the only way for someone to do a search is to use the 
mouse to click on the flashlight. I'm not able to position the mouse 
over the flashlight, so I cannot click on it. I *can*, however, use the 
keyboard.

Please provide a method to open the search dialog from the keyboard. One 
way to do this might be to make the flashlight object keyboard 
traversable. If you do that, it would be great, but you should also make 
sure to provide a textual equivalent for the flashlight icon so that 
users with visual impairments can use assistive technologies such as 
orca to have the object presented to them in speech and/or braille. You 
can find more information about this in the GNOME Accessibility 
Developer's Guide at 
http://library.gnome.org/devel/accessibility-devel-guide/nightly/. If 
you have any questions, please also feel free to ask on the 
gnome-accessibility-list mailing list."

Will