I've done some more background reading on accessibility, and I've now got three simple guidelines to follow that help a lot in getting our products accessible.
The first one is keyboard access. Everything in the application should be usable with keyboard only. Besides being a requirement for people who can't use a mouse, this helps usability overall. This is our 0.6 goal, but there are a fair number of bugs on our way. There are also issues in wxWidgets, but those are out of the scope for 0.6. The second one is color usage. Do not rely on color only when conveying information. It is ok to enhance information with color, of course. Also, when picking colors, it is important to choose colors that work well with people that have difficulties in differentiating between different colors. Also, if possible, users should be able to choose colors that suit them. The third point is: no blinking. No blinking text, or flickering or blinking images or animations. The UI should avoid these completely, but we also need to have settings to sanitize content that comes in through sharing and email for example. There need to be settings to disable animations or disable images altogether. Blinking can cause serious problems for certain people. These guidelines are applicable for both desktop and web-based applications. For more information about accessibility (including the beginning of Chandler accessibility template), head over to http://wiki.osafoundation.org/bin/view/Projects/AccessibilityProject -- Heikki Toivonen
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