Re: REMINDER: GEP-2 discussion end date

[Bill Haneman <bill haneman sun com>]

On Thu, 2002-09-26 at 22:38, Havoc Pennington wrote:
> 
> <bordoley msu edu> writes:
> > 
> > I'm not sure if this has been discussed in this thread or not, but I think
> > this issue may be a rare case where accessibility requirements contradict with
> > general usability. I for one do not want to see a melding of all "appearance"
> > related capplets (ie. font, theme, background etc.). However for users with
> > accessibility concerns having all the "look and feel" options in one
> > convenient place is probably a requirement. So I'm wondering if a compromise
> > can be met. What I'm thinking is that we keep the current capplets but add an
> > additional appearance capplet to the accessibility preferences menus which
> > provides all of these options in a way that meets the requirements of users
> > for whom accessibility is an issue. Thoughts?
> > 
> 
> Well, I still have some hope we could have a nice simple metatheme
> feature like Windows XP does...

I agree with Havoc about this (and Owen too, IIRC).  Personally I don't
feel that we need to swallow up all the existing appearance settings
into one mega-dialog.  I think the reason this suggestion (one big
dialog) keeps coming up is because of concerns about having "more than
one theme capplet" in the menus.  

Having separate capplets or having several, I don't think that part
matters to accessibility as long as *one* dialog somewhere offers
more-or-less what hp and owen have suggested (and looks much like the XP
metatheme dialog).

> Maybe this should be separate from a more complicated "canned settings
> profile" feature, if that's what accessibility requires.

I don't quite follow you here.  But from a UI perspective (not talking
here about the back-end), the simple dialog is the same as a "canned
settings profile" as I understand it.  

I think most of the UIs and mockups are the same in terms of what they
offer, they are just a little different in layout.  So I think I agree
about what the dialog should looks like and its relative feature set,
especially if you think the XP one is ok.

Note however that XP does something rather odd, which personally I think
is a silly idea: it exposes special accessibility themes (under the
checkbox "high contrast", then you need the "settings" button) from the
"Accessibility->Display" dialog, although there is really no functional
difference between that dialog and the "Display" theme dialog.  In fact
if you select one of the "accessibility themes", then go to the
"Display" dialog (e.g. the metatheme dialog), you can "Save As..." and
then access your "accessibility theme" from the regular metathemer.  So
why not just list it there in the first place ?

This seems like both unnecessary duplication, and pointless
inconsistency.  The only reason I can see for omitting them is the fact
that there are so many of them in XP, but we could have a "hide
accessibility themes" checkbox or something, and dispense with the
unnecessary extra dialog.
 
> We need to clarify which features are an accessibility _requirement_
> (needed for users with disability XYZ to use the computer effectively,
> according to objective criteria), which features are an accessibility
> "would be nice for certain kinds of disability," and which features
> are just things some users said they liked in the same way 200 people
> a day tell me they can't use the computer unless they have edge
> flipping and shade-hover mode.
> 
> Maybe design a nice simple Windows XP style feature; ask if it's good
> enough for accessibility or can be made so without making the UI bad;
> and if the answer is no, do a separate feature for accessibility.  But
> I don't think we should give up right away.

I think XP has done a very poor job in some areas here, we can and
certainly should do better.  Their accessibility dialogs don't even
conform to their accessibility themes!

I think a lot of us agree (based on Havoc's comments and owen's) at this
point about what the UI should basically look like, which is sort of a
miracle in itself :-)

Unlike the "keyboard accessibility" one, I think this one can be very
simple ;-)

Bill

> Havoc