Re: [Usability] Close buttons on instant-apply dialogs

[Peter Korn <korn sun com>]

Hi Michael,

There is a real tension between making it "dead-simple easy" for developers to
make accessible applications and getting developers to fully express
accessibility information in their applications.  It's not always clear what
the right decision is in any given situation.

You wrote:

> On Thu, 2002-01-03 at 02:53, Christian Rose wrote:
> > We can't, actually. Contrary to Windows, Mac OS, KDE and many other
> > environments, GNOME is pretty much window manager agnostic and allows
> > use of several window managers.
> 
>     It seems totally reasonable to me to have fewer options [ such as
> pretty GUI Window manager decorations or their absence ] for an
> accessible configuration.

Agreed.  This is an important principle -> we can't make every window manager
as accessible as we'ld like, but having a *very* accessible one that works
with all applications well is critical.

>     It makes no sense to me to make all the myriad (obscure & many useless)
> options accessible - what we should do is concentrate on making a single
> configuration / setup / set of options - that is brilliantly accessible.

Options of what though?  Window manager options?  Application options?

>     Thus for menu tearoffs - which are essentially a not very accessible
> GUI feature, we should simply ensure that these are turned off in some
> sort of "known good accessible option set" - rather than investing hours
> of head scratching into making them more accessible in some way.

When we get to things like tearoffs, we get into murky water on the
"dead-simple easy" part of the tension above.  If tearoffs aren't accessible,
then each and every developer who wants to make an application that uses a
tearoff menu will need to do extra, special work, to make sure that things
aren't torn off, or that functionality is duplicated in accessible ways,
or...  Further, automated test tools to verify that the programmer did the
right accessible thing with their app would be near-impossible to create and
use.  

If we invest hours of head scratching now, we potentially save hundreds
(thousands?) of developers head scratching later, and the thousands
(millions?) of GNOME users with disabilities hours of cursing when they
encounter an application that uses tearoffs that one of those
hundreds/thousands of developers forgot to make sure had duplicate accessible
means of interacting well with.

Cheers,


Peter Korn
Sun Accessibility team