<div class="gmail_quote">---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Phill Whiteside <<a href="mailto:phillw@phillw.net">phillw@phillw.net</a>> Date: Thu, Feb 18, 2010 at 9:17 PM Subject: Re: [orca-list] Making Ubuntu Software Center accessible To: Hugh Sasse <<a href="mailto:hgs@dmu.ac.uk">hgs@dmu.ac.uk</a>> The raft of sometimes contradictory standards proposals are a nightmare. I've been recently looking into providing fuller support for web-site readers - one set of standards for CSS has been demoted, a new set is kicking around from Web Accessibility Initiative and yet more proposals for the next CSS - I'm not sure what to code to, just for a web-site. Imagine being the author of software, you could spend a lot of time meeting a set of standards, to find they have been supplanted. My views on the matter are over here --> <a href="http://forum.phillw.net/viewtopic.php?f=14&t=32" target="_blank">http://forum.phillw.net/viewtopic.php?f=14&t=32</a> But, heck, I am trying !! Regards, Phill.<div><div></div><div class="h5"> <div class="gmail_quote">On Thu, Feb 18, 2010 at 6:50 PM, Hugh Sasse <<a href="mailto:hgs@dmu.ac.uk" target="_blank">hgs@dmu.ac.uk</a>> wrote: <blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); padding-left: 1ex;"> I think there's a more fundamental question here. That is: "Why are people still developing inaccessible software?" The Americans With Disabilities Act dates back nearly two decades, the UK legislation is about 15 years old, and that's just the legal side of things, ignoring culture. So why aren't people catching up with this? I think there are a number of answers to this, but they include * Much of the information out there is about available applications and configuring them by/for the disabled user * There would seem to be nothing in the acceptance process which means that inaccessible applications are rejected for inclusion in GNU/Linux. [I don't know enough about that to be certain...] * A quick search shows little for the programmer along the lines of how to make your application accessible. I found Accerciser through <a href="http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/9991" target="_blank">http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/9991</a> but good though that is, it is rather "after the event", as opposed to how to write in accessibility from the start. * Much of the material is pretty intimidating for someone starting out in terms of the number of things you have to cover. Just taking vision: speech access, braille access, large print access, the needs of colour blind people, be that red/green, blue/yellow, or total colour blindness. [Then there's deafblindness...] * The wider case for accessibility doesn't seem to be put forward enough. Much is said about full participation of the whole of society, but that won't get most people to jump at the chance to add accessibility. What seems to be left out is that something accessible is usually easier to script with another technology, because there are more hooks into it. Textual interfaces can be screen scraped easily, etc. A search for Accessibility Howto (a particularly blunt instrument for this sort of thing) only turns up this on the second page: <a href="http://www.faqs.org/docs/Linux-HOWTO/Accessibility-Dev-HOWTO.html" target="_blank">http://www.faqs.org/docs/Linux-HOWTO/Accessibility-Dev-HOWTO.html</a> and it is dated 2002, which is probably rather old now. I'd suggest that there is a need for people who know more about GNU/Linux accessibility than I do [1] to write about it for a wider audience to get the techniques out there. "As a programmer this will benefit you, because you can do [...] as a result of the accessibility hooks being there." Etc. I don't think the problems will start to go away until more people are aware of how easy the easy things are. The difficult things will come later. Hugh [1] I don't know much about the programming of accessibility yet. I'm hoping this will change when (if?) I get more time. <div><div></div><div> -- Ubuntu-accessibility mailing list <a href="mailto:Ubuntu-accessibility@lists.ubuntu.com" target="_blank">Ubuntu-accessibility@lists.ubuntu.com</a> <a href="https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-accessibility" target="_blank">https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-accessibility</a> </div></div></blockquote></div> </div></div></div>