Re: the keyboard accessibility capplet

[Bill Haneman <bill haneman sun com>]

On Thu, 2002-09-26 at 01:14, Havoc Pennington wrote:

> > * there is "prior art" in GUIs for this (yes, known to users as
> > "AccessX"), and users who need keyboard accessibility help have grown
> > strongly attached to features in that prior art.  That includes not only
> > the CDE AccessX control panel, but GUIs for AccessX from several rehab
> > centers, etc.
> 
> By this argument we should be copying CDE in a lot more places. 

Why do you think my argument suggests this?  Prior art here is important
since it's cross-platform and cross-desktop; I am not just talking about
CDE here, I am talking about the majority of the prior art for
Unix/Linux keyboard accessibility, (with the exception of command-line
interfaces for AccessX), and even some Windows keyboard accessibility
(before Windows had it built-in).

If you must draw an analogy, that's why we are using menus,
mouse-clicks, onscreen-buttons, in GNOME instead of inventing totally
new UI models: because they are the convention for GUIS.

> The
> more important prior art in terms of number of users is probably the
> Windows XP accessibility capplet - which is MUCH MUCH better arranged
> than ours, but has similar features.

It's worth looking at XP, but the requirements for our existing capplet
were already obtained from multiple domain experts in accessibility, I
don't see why we think we are better qualified to determine them than
they are.

If we discuss the requirements further, the discussion should move to
gnome-accessibility-list, so that other knowledgeable voices can
contribute as well.

-Bill