Subject: Accessibility (a11y) for all [was Re: Usability for All]
I've CC'ed the user list because there is a lot we can all learn and relatively easy ways you can help test the accessibility (a11y) of Inkscape and it can have all kinds of knock on benefits.
On Fri, 12 Aug 2005, Bryce Harrington wrote:
Date: Fri, 12 Aug 2005 22:53:20 -0700 From: Bryce Harrington <bryce@...69...> To: Alan Horkan <horkana@...3...> Cc: inkscape-devel@lists.sourceforge.net, inkscape-user@lists.sourceforge.net Subject: Re: Usability for All [was Re: [Inkscape-devel] Proposal for inkscape-testers]
On Fri, Aug 05, 2005 at 04:15:38PM +0100, Alan Horkan wrote:
On Thu, 4 Aug 2005, bulia byak wrote:
...
sustained discussion of QA topics like usability, testing, and so forth,
Usability is definitely a topic for ALL devs (and users) to discuss.
I'm really glad you said that. :)
Accessibility is for everyone too.
Hi Alan,
We've talked about accessibility before; do you know if there are any tests or projects that investigate accessibility issues?
Accessibility is one of those things I've always meant to learn more about. Anytime I feel my hands getting sore from too much typing I hope I feel bad about making things more accessible because I'm someday I will probably need it.
The basics you need to consider and which also feed into usability are
1) Can I do everything using only the keyboard? 2) Can everything be themed properly? 3) Can the standard assisitive technologies be used?
1) The point is not that you would necessarily want to work using only a keyboard but making it possible has important side effects.
The more it is possible to do without depending on the two button mouse the better. We will want to be careful to make Inkscape work well with Pen input devices anyway but it is something all developers should be careful about. (Apple ship with a single button mouse by default because of the discipline it forces on developers more than anything else.)
This is something all users can help out with and improvements here should help make Inkscape even better to use when you do have both the mouse and keyboard in action. All you need to do is unplug your mouse (or instead unplug you keyboard and do not use the right click or wheel) and see what you can do. If you keep a diary or log as you go and jot down any problems you might encounter or try and identify any tasks which are extremeley tedious and repetative you could really help find areas which could be improved.
2) High Contrast themes are important. People with vision difficulties, even blind users will want to draw things occasionally. http://dub.washington.edu/projects/ic2d/
3) Standard assistive technologies include Gok, Gnopernicus, Dasher and I'm sure there are more I don't know about yet. Don't make any assumptions about these applications before you have tried them (dont really have time to explain any better).
Accessibility makes it all the more important to use standard widgets most of which have already been accessible whereas rolling your own "innovative" widgets can create a nasty new variety of problems. If custom widgets must be created it is better for us all in the long run to push them down into toolkit. Inkscape has been very good about this and I just want to reassure the developers it is the right thing to do.
Developers should probably check out the two applications at-spi and at-poke, "at" is short for Accessibility Toolkit (also referred to as ATK) and these applications will help you to evaluate your software.
If you are interested in Accessiblity I think it will be important to have a build --with-gnome because I believe including those extra libraries draws in a stack of ATK related libraries which can have some benefits. Of course I care about portability too (portability both to other operating systems and future versions of the toolkits we use) so it is always better when these features are cleanly seperable.
I wrote this all from memory and it summarises a lot of what I have learned about accessiblity over the years. If you ask the accessibility team and read through their documentation I expect there is a lot more you can learn but what I have already mentioned should resemble the Frequently Asked Questions.
Hope that helps.
Sincerely
Alan Horkan Jack of all trades, master of none ;)
Inkscape http://inkscape.org Abiword http://www.abisource.com Dia http://gnome.org/projects/dia/ Open Clip Art http://OpenClipArt.org
Alan's Diary http://advogato.org/person/AlanHorkan/