Re: Re Accessibility

[Calum Benson <calum benson sun com>]

On Thu, 2002-08-08 at 17:48, Edward A. Falk wrote:
 
> It occurs to me that an "accessibility style guide" should be included
> standard with the gtk & gnome docs.

You're right, we're rather lacking on that front at the moment.

There is an "Accessibility Developer's Guide" on the GNOME Accessibility
Project website.  It's incomplete, but does at least include a few pages
of UI guidelines to follow that will help to make your app accessible:  

http://developer.gnome.org/projects/gap/guide/gad/index.html

(These guidelines do also all appear in the GNOME UI Guidelines
document, but they're not flagged specifically as being "the ones to
follow for accessibility" there.)

There is some talk of merging the Accessibility, Usability and
Documentation guidelines into one big document, or at least bundling
them altogether in the same place... this is certainly a good idea,
although it's probably a big job to do it well :/

> Is any work being done on gtk/gnome to build accessibility in?  E.g. hooks
> into checkboxes, etc. for screen readers, alternative display styles etc.?

Yes, a great deal of work has gone into the 2.0 toolkits to make this
happen.  The modules you should take a look at are atk, gail and
at-spi.  You'll also find information about these at
http://developer.gnome.org/projects/gap.

Cheeri,
Calum.

-- 
CALUM BENSON, Usability Engineer       Sun Microsystems Ireland
mailto:calum benson ireland sun com    Desktop Engineering Group
http://www.sun.ie                      +353 1 819 9771

Any opinions are personal and not necessarily those of Sun Microsystems