On 22/06/2010 4:42 AM, David Bolter wrote: >>> This API suggestion is just illustrative. Something like this would >>> allow applications to provide needed support without wasting performance >>> by also providing unused support. Thoughts? >> This sounds okay. The problem is that in order to preserve backwards >> compatibility with older ATs which don't know about this new API, apps >> will have to enable everything by default anyway, which rather defeats >> the purpose. > Yeah. There are a few things we can do to make this more graceful. We > can detect some AT and versions (looking at the modules loaded into the > application process) and make good guesses to avoid regressing users of > older AT. Just FYI, we don't set dll version info for NVDA in-process dlls at present.
> In the absence of this detection, we could still default to > full support unless someone calls this new API, after which we provide > the union of the requested support and any other requested support calls > during the running of the application. I thought you were trying to solve the issue of clients (such as tablet software) enabling a11y and degrading performance. In that case, this solution doesn't actually solve anything, as full a11y has to be enabled anyway. > Then the worst case scenario is a user of an undetected AT "foo" also > has a tool that requests minimal accessibility and has no other tool > running which requests the functionality needed by "foo". We could maybe > solve this by offering a free download of a tool that just requests > functionality. Having downloadable tools to do x and y for a11y is really ugly. As a user, I don't want to have to mess around with this. It makes the software highly unattractive to me. Btw, there's also the case of multiple ATs running simultaneously. A user shouldn't use multiple ATs of the same type, but they might well use multiple different types of AT, all with differing requirements. Some might know about this new API, others might not. Those that don't might break when those that do disable features that are required by the former. Jamie -- James Teh Vice President NV Access Inc, ABN 61773362390 Email: [email protected] Web site: http://www.nvaccess.org/ _______________________________________________ Accessibility-ia2 mailing list [email protected] https://lists.linux-foundation.org/mailman/listinfo/accessibility-ia2
