On 03/06/2012 09:18 AM, Alan Bell wrote:
On the plus side I do believe that the fixes are really quite small,
and then I expect it will be quite good in comparison to older
releases. What concerns me the most is that things are not being
tested until too late. *Designs* are not tested for accessibility. The
design team should be doing accessibility testing before anyone writes
any code. It should be known roughly what script an orca user would
hear when going through the dash or the hud or the menus etc. before
they get coded up. This is massively easier to do than drawing
pictures for the visual design (it is just text) and would probably
help the design and implementation process much more than it would be
any kind of overhead.
Hopefully that is the case.
I don't use that sort of language lightly on public mailing lists,
yeah, best not to. It doesn't really make your point any stronger and
then people end up focussing on that and not the broken software that
needs fixing.
Unfortunately, I'm part of a group that gets left behind as a matter of
course. Whenever a new platform comes out, it's a given that I as a
blind user won't be able to use it for at least a year. Even then, it
may be two more years before access is compelling (I'm writing an
Android screen reader, and it wasn't until October that I actually felt
like it was a decently-accessible platform.) Also, whether you like or
dislike Winphone 7, Microsoft just flat out didn't consider
accessibility at all, and while WP7 may not have been the best choice,
it should at least have been a choice. Ubuntu is rapidly becoming
something that is not a choice for disabled users because new releases
that fix bugs for able-bodied people merely break things worse for us.
I regret that it detracts, but if just being who you are and existing
isn't a compelling reason for people from all platforms to design with
you in mind, and if a company refuses to learn from its proven track
record of shipping production-ready releases that are unusable for some
despite the availability of knowledge that would fix that, well, I have
a hard time approaching that level of exclusion coolly and calmly.
So let's get this stuff fixed, OK? And let's put in place *now*
processes that prevent this going forward. I'm tired of having this
discussion every time a beta gets released, then six months later it's
like "oh, wow, we're having this chat for the first time aren't we?" Uh,
no, we *aren't*.
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