Re: Fwd: accessebility suggestion for Ubuntu 6.06 LiveCD

[Bill Haneman <Bill Haneman Sun COM>]

On Mon, 2006-07-24 at 16:38, Chris Jones wrote:
> Bill Haneman said:
> >I don't recall ever "refusing" to fix any corepointer
> >issues, for instance - at the time you asked, there were multiple
> >research efforts under way to try and address them.
> 
> Maybe I put that too strongly.  You stated that the fix was to have a
> second input device and were unwilling to consider, or at least gave
> me the impression that there was not anything that could be done about
> it.  This may have been a flaw in my own interpretation.

My point was the using the corepointer, 'as is', was not acceptable from
an accessibility point of view because of lockout scenarios and serious
conflict with toolkit pointer behavior.  I stand by that - the only
reason I suggest it can be done with Xevie is because Xevie gives us a
means of intercepting the pointer events before the toolkit or
applications see them.

> I also count the dependence on sticky keys a configuration issue.

StickyKeys is available on all recent x servers.  So in that respect,
it's not a configuration issue, since the OSK can programmatically set
this (and should, for various reasons).  No modification of the default
Xserver configuration is necessary.

> As a general rule no application should be too dependent on the
> configuration of the underlying operating system be it Xorg
> configurations or a11y configuration.  Completely aside from the
> inconvenience to the user, conflicts between applications with
> different configuration requirements could become quite likely.

Of course.  Simiilarly, applications must also not implement features
that are too similar to existing platform features, because that can
also result in conflicts from the end-user's point of view.  This is
especially important where accessibility is concerned, and in fact the
Section 508 accessibility requirements explicitly require conforming
applications not to conflict with the operation of existing platform
accessibility features.  This is one reason why applications that wish
to use keyboard latching or locking must be very careful about how they
implement it, and preferably they should use the existing StickyKeys
services built in to the X server.

Bill

> It's very easy for an application developer to think that his or her
> application is the most important thing running on a users machine,
> though it is not a fair assumption to make.
> 
> --
> Chris Jones