GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 76315
AccessX is a bad name for the menu item
Last modified: 2004-12-22 21:47:04 UTC
How about "accessibility"? AccessX is apparently some funky CDE thing.
This is unlikely to change. There was an explicit request for this name because it is familiar to users from X11R6 and CDE.
Calum does this really make any general sense? The CDE issue is a Sun concern, it is not a concern that applies to the overall GNOME project. It should be trivial to patch the .desktop file in the Sun distribution. But most Red Hat users for example have never even seen CDE. This is the GNOME accessibility capplet as long as it's in the gnome-control-center module and not the sun-accessibility-capplet module. We need to make UI decisions accordingly.
AccessX is by no means just a CDE or Sun thing-- it's a standard on most unix desktops (you can see the groovy SGI version at ftp://ftp.sgi.com/sgi/desktop/accessx/SGIaccessx.gif, for example), and a standard AccessX control dialog has been available as part of X11R6 for a year or so (http://ftp.x.org/pub/R6.6/xc/extras/accessx). In that respect I think it's widespread enough to assume that any unix user who has accessibility needs will know about AccessX. Even the Windows XP Accessibility control panel has now adopted more of the AccessX terminology than it used to (StickyKeys, MouseKeys etc.), although it doesn't go as far as calling it the 'AccessX' control panel because it has other stuff in there as well that accessx doesn't cover. Even if we didn't call it AccessX, what else could we call it? It's not 'the' accessbility control panel, because there will eventually be control panels in the Accessibility section for controlling things like screenreader and on-screen keyboard config. Right now you could just about get away with calling it the 'Keyboard Accessibility' control panel I guess (although MouseKeys is borderline), but only until they decide to add some non-keyboard stuff to the AccessX standard...
Why not call it "keyboard accessibility" and then if they add non-keyboard stuff in AccessX we put that in a _different_ panel, i.e. organize things logically not by standard... we don't have Unicode settings in a control panel called "ISO10646" or drag-and-drop settings in a control panel called "XDND" - this seems extremely technical-user-oriented. Or have one accessibility capplet, with tabs for Keyboard, Screen, etc. - you could easily do this if we kill the General/Misc tab and move it to the Keyboard tab after deleting some of the cruft from the Keyboard tab (see one of my other bugs in here). The general GNOME menu naming uses "Calculator" not "gcalc," "Word Processor" not "AbiWord" etc, right?
Heck, there's no reason users should even know they're running "X" any more than they know they have "GDI" on Windows.
We thought about having just the one tabbed capplet, but decided since it wasn't at all clear how few/many tabs it would end up having in future, it was worth taking the step of adding a new control center category on this occasion. As for calling the AccessX capplet "Keyboard Accessibility" (or just "Keyboard", since it's already in the 'Accessibility' section)-- I could live with that, but I don't know if Sun would... Bill, any thoughts?
I think that keyboard, as a subpanel of "Accessibility", is OK. However "AccessX" is a recognized feature (by that specific name) within the disability community, it's not a CDE thing at all, but an X feature. In that case, one of the few "X" features that end users do recognize by name...
We spoke about this within Sun today, and the accessibility team here are generally in agreement that 'Accessibility->Keyboard' is a better term than 'Accessibility->AccessX' from a usability perspective (don't think there was ever much doubt about that). There was just some concern as to whether X.Org might be a little ticked off at the non-use of the term AccessX to refer to something that's clearly a GUI for AccessX, as they're apparently keen to promote and protect that term, but we're looking into that.
Making sure jody is cc'd. Do we have agreement on Accessibility->Keyboard, then?
Done. I prefer this, which is why I used that directory tree.
Probably fine to use Accessibility->Keyboard for now, yes... if I hear objections from on high at a later date, I'll let you know...