Hello, First of all, thanks for making this possible.
At 11:11 AM -0500 1/17/08, Willie Walker wrote: >One of the most important things for us to do right now is identify >where we need to improve. This may result in positive things such as >funding opportunities and the like. > >Over the coming week, please set aside some time to look at >http://live.gnome.org/Accessibility/GetInvolved. It contains a large >list of stuff to do, but it represents a pretty complete list of things >people have mentioned over the past few years. > >What I'd like you to do is look at the page with these things in mind: > >1) If there is something missing from the list, please make a >suggestion. I'm looking for concrete ideas. Things such as "we need to >do more for people with hearing disabilities" are less likely to get >addressed than specific tasks such as "develop close captioning software >for x, y, z." On the same front, something like "Be more researchy" is >more of a section where specific research and advanced development >topics should live. I have added the "Improve efficiency of the GNOME desktop for mouse-only users" to the above mentioned wiki page. In fact, GNOME is lacking (or did I miss it?) an onscreen keyboard targeted specifically at people that have no difficulty to move the mouse/pointer (regardless of whether it is a standard mouse or some adaptive hardware like a headpointer), but are not able to use a hardware keyboard. For users that have difficulties to use the mouse button, there is mousetweaks that should fill the gap. Unfortunately, I have not found any keyboard on linux as efficient as the commercial product that I am using on the other operating system: There is dasher that is reputed to have a good prediction engine; but it seems to lack the possibilities to control the desktop. There is gok, which seems to be rather targeted at users that can not efficiently use the pointer. It has word completion without word prediction. The keyboard is not resizable,... Should dasher be enhanced, should the composer in gok be enhanced, or should a new project aimed at the mouse only users be started from scratch? I don't know. By the way, the GetInvolved page mentions porting gok to python. Why the port? Cheap Head Mice? The adaptive Headpointers that I know of, use special reference items weird by the user to track his movement. I wonder whether a simple camera (webcam) working without a reference item can be accurate enough to use it as headpointer. Does anybody have any experience with "reference-less" headpointing? About writing drivers for headpointers: do you have any headpointers in mind? Some headpointers (usually the more expensive models) present themselves as a normal mouse to the computer and consequently should work with the mouse driver shipped by the operating: this has the advantage of not requiring a specific driver (and maybe the disadvantage of not being customizable). Another point I am wondering about: Am I right when I think that there is a standard about making the computer accessible for users that can only use the keyboard!? If it is true, maybe that a standard for people that can only use the mouse (with and without buttons) could also be useful. >2) If you were someone who suggested one of the ideas, please help fill >out the details. You obviously mentioned it because you thought it was >important, so please make sure it is represented well on the page. If anything is not clear in the "Improve efficiency of the GNOME desktop for mouse-only users" part of the GetInvolved page, please let me know and I will try to improve it. >3) Look at the list. What are the top 5 to 10 things that need doing on >the list, including stuff you may have added? Write your top choices >down. Send them to me. Unfortunately, I don't have much knowledge about the different solutions available for the various disabilities, and the state of these solutions. Consequently a top 10 list from my part would not make much sense. >3) Think about where you may be able to step up and help and your >availability. I could exchange my ideas with the developer, test what he produces,... (but I will not be able to do the coding) About the availability: currently I am quite busy, but I hope it will be better in a few months. Best regards. Francesco _______________________________________________ gnome-accessibility-list mailing list gnome-accessibility-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/gnome-accessibility-list
