Re: [Usability] The Pathetic State of the GNU/Linux Desktop

[Rodney Dawes <dobey novell com>]

On Mon, 2007-02-19 at 05:55 -0500, Jacob Beauregard wrote:
> >> P.S. And now I will mention that this entire letter is stream of 
> >> consciousness, so good luck reading it.
> >>     
> >
> > Yeah, the way to go to show good manners and respect for your readers. 
> > Like, do you really want to communicate something else except some 
> > vague frustration?
> >
> >   
> Wow, this response is the least constructive I've received. A lot of the 
> KDE people have been focused on many of the problems I've mentioned here 
> for quite some time.

If you want constructive responses, you should learn to word your
complaints constructively. Pretty much every electronics device sold
within the last 6-10 years or so, in the US, comes with a warning label:

"Do not dispose of in fire."

If you don't want flames, don't throw a bunch of toxic batteries into
the fire. It will most definitely incite responses of a common nature.
Telling people that their work sucks, and they don't know how to write
code for blind people, is only going to cause responses of a similar
nature. Not that the response in question, to your original mail, is
particularly negative, or not constructive, but your response definitely
is. It in fact tells me that your entire goal here, is to try and start
a flame war, by praising KDE, and dousing GNOME, on a GNOME list.

------

As for your original mail, the accessibility support in GNOME for the
most part, meets or exceeds that of Windows, as well as standards set
by the US Government. Also, much of the code relating to accessibility,
was written by at least one person who is in fact, blind. That said,
those who are blind, are not the only target of the accessibility
framework. What about users who are deaf? Illiterate? Paralyzed or who
are amputees? What about users who simply have age-related sight and
hearing problems, where they can still see and hear, but not as good
as they could in their youth? What about users with disabilities in
other countries, who don't speak English or use a Latin character set?

The overbearing goal of GNOME is to be as easy to use, for as many
persons as possible. Just making something better for one blind person,
may make things worse for other blind users, or normal users, or many
other types of users. All of these user types need to be taken into
account when developing technologies to help any one subset, to be able
to accommodate this goal.

On your point of interoperability, your statements have nothing to do
with interoperability. It is all about consistency. However, everyone
has their own opinions about what is and isn't better. If everyone used
the same toolkit to write their applications, it would be much easier to
make things consistent. However, we have GTK+, QT, Motif, Windows,
XForms, and several others to choose from. If you run apps from all of
these different toolkits under an environment that uses one of those
toolkits for the major portion of the desktop, you are going to notice
inconsistencies in behavior between those applications, and ones written
to conform to the standards of that desktop. Flaming GNOME because Opera
doesn't fit in, is hardly going to solve the problem.

If you really have constructive criticism, then please go back and
re-think what you are trying to say, and choose your words more wisely.
Trying to flame a project, simply because someone else who is "famous"
is doing similar, isn't going to help anything. Throwing rocks at the
beehive is only going to get you stung and swollen. :)

-- dobey