> > js: I'm interested by this. I was under the impression that gnome put a lot > of effort into usability and accessibility, and epiphany is gnomes browser. > kk > cdh: GNOME accessibility has had a lot invested in it but, in some places, it it is entirely broken. Most of this work happened in the Sun access technology group which has been disbanded by lay offs and assigning its members to other tasks within Sun.
cdh: Applications that run on GNOME may not have even the default accessibility as, if they were built for an earlier version of GNOME, they won't contain access to the accessibility API. Epiphany seems to be one such program that is much older than GNOME accessibility API so it will not be accessible unless someone goes back into it and does an overhaul on its UI code. My least favorite of these problems is that the GNOME Network Manager has no accessibility support so, if launched while orca is running, will only say, "Network Manager not accessible" and then go silent until one leaves the program. I really do not enjoy using command line things like iwconfig every time I need to find a wireless access point in a hotel or some other place that my computer doesn't already know about. cdh: Also, the first GNOME screen reader, called gnopernicus, written by a German company under contract to Sun was such a hopeless failure that, after a few years, they chucked the whole thing and started writing orca from scratch. This set back GNOME accessibility by a number of years as they hardly had any way to really exercise their ever changing accessibility API. cdh: So, GNOME has the most comprehensive and interesting accessibility API out there but older applications don't know about it and a lot of newer applications only use the default accessibility which, without a programmer providing useful information, is only adequate for programs that only use common GNOME controls which tends to be the case for quick and dirty small utilities but far less likely on more complex applications. cdh: There is a very serious leadership gap in all of accessibility these days and even more so on GNU/Linux. This is the vacuum we hope to fill as GNU has done with other things so often before. >> >> [1] >> http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/gnewsense-dev/2010-03/msg00152.html > > > -- > Karl Goetz, (Kamping_Kaiser / VK5FOSS) > Debian contributor / gNewSense Maintainer > http://www.kgoetz.id.au > No, I won't join your social networking group
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