Re: Can the community work with Gnome to improve GTK+ a11y?

[Joseph Scheuhammer <clown alum mit edu>]

Peter, Christian,

On 12-01-05 11:31 AM, Christian Hofstader wrote:
> I generally agree with Peter here…
>
>
> I think the user agent, Orca in this case, can and should provide 
> augmentations to the overall user experience. Items that do not gain 
> focus ordinarily need to be presented to users with vision impairment 
> anyway as knowing what isn't available in a certain mode is 
> tremendously important to us.

I didn't argue any differently, quite the opposite:  I concluded that 
keyboard only users need some way to navigate to disabled items to 
acquire information about them.

Regarding conflating sighted vs. screen reading keyboard-only users, I 
made no claim how that navigation was accomplished.  Building it in is 
one way of doing it.  Having an AT augment the built-in navigation 
scheme is another.  Although, if "... everything *must* be built-in ... 
" for sighted keyboard-only users (as Peter noted), then, in this case, 
there is nothing to augment.  An AT can avail itself of the built-in 
behaviour.

Peter wrote:
> I not certain what the right answer is here for unavailable menu items...

Neither am I really -- I'm just a programmer.  The main objection I've 
heard is that a sighted keyboard-only user would be annoyed at having to 
navigate to something they can't activate.  But, has anyone actually 
done the user experience study(ies)?  For all I know, users with 
cognitive impairments might appreciate the highlighting that occurs if 
they could navigate to the disabled item.  Perhaps the best answer is 
that navigation to disabled items should be a user preference.

--
;;;;joseph.


'A: After all, it isn't rocket science.'
'K: Right. It's merely computer science.'
             - J. D. Klaun -