GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 603646
Rework the Universal Access Preferences UI
Last modified: 2011-09-09 14:54:34 UTC
The current Universal Access Preferences UI gets us going in a good direction, but I think some more work can be done to improve the overall user experience and making the out-of-the-box experience better for accessibility users. I've worked up a discussion/proposal at http://live.gnome.org/Accessibility/PreferencesRework, and I'm opening this bug as a means to track/discuss patches for the work. From that page: "The main issue is that things seem hard to grasp and the out of the box experience can be cumbersome. You need to know, for example, that you have to run "Orca" to get speech and "GOK" to get the on screen keyboard. The proposal at the end of this page attempts to centralize access to accessibility features based upon the user's needs (e.g., 'speech', 'dwell clicking', etc.) versus the actual accessibility applications." Note that the proposal may need patches for several components. I will open bugs in those components as appropriate.
Regarding the Accessibility Setup Wizard idea: http://live.gnome.org/Accessibility/PreferencesRework#Futures_-_some_sort_of_Accessibility_Setup_Wizard - we are working on just such a wizard for our customer Media Access Australia: http://www.mediaaccess.org.au/ Initial package here, only semi-functional at present (version 0.74): http://apt.64studio.com/backports/pool/main/m/maa-config/ It's a Python and GTK+ wizard written by Patrick Shirkey - he is currently putting the gconf hooks into it.
The UI code doesn't live in gsd, but in gnome-control-center.
Can you confirm this with gnome control center 3.0? I guess it should be set as obsolete, as the Universal access preferences UI has been completely rewritten.
Is the new universal access preferences UI in gnome control center 3.0 itself accessible to users with impairments? For example, do you need vision to switch on the features for visually impaired users? This was the chicken-and-egg problem with GNOME 2.x that we are attempting to solve with an accessibility setup wizard. This wizard uses large fonts and speech output, for example. If there isn't anything like this in GNOME 3.x, please leave the ticket open for now.
(In reply to comment #3) > Can you confirm this with gnome control center 3.0? I guess it should be set as > obsolete, as the Universal access preferences UI has been completely rewritten. It's been rewritten indeed. (In reply to comment #4) > Is the new universal access preferences UI in gnome control center 3.0 itself > accessible to users with impairments? For example, do you need vision to switch > on the features for visually impaired users? This was the chicken-and-egg > problem with GNOME 2.x that we are attempting to solve with an accessibility > setup wizard. This wizard uses large fonts and speech output, for example. If > there isn't anything like this in GNOME 3.x, please leave the ticket open for > now. Except that it's not what this bug is about (and you can already turn on a number of a11y preferences through the keyboard or using gnome-shell's universal access menu).
I read that this bug was about "making the out-of-the-box experience better for accessibility users". Imagine that the user doesn't know the keyboard shortcuts, or can't use the standard menu.
(In reply to comment #6) > I read that this bug was about "making the out-of-the-box experience better for > accessibility users". Imagine that the user doesn't know the keyboard > shortcuts, or can't use the standard menu. What would you do in that case? The bug was about removing the use of program names in the UI, and concentrating on what help it can provide instead. Which is exactly what the new Universal Access UI does. We have a number of bugs opened about changing the default keyboard shortcuts for enabling accessibility or adding gestures to enable those (in gnome-settings-daemon). I don't think there's much more than can be done in the control-center itself, but feel free to file a new bug if you feel there's more to be done.