[orca-list] Making Ubuntu Software Center accessible

[Hugh Sasse]

I think there's a more fundamental question here.  That is:
"Why are people still developing inaccessible software?"

The Americans With Disabilities Act dates back nearly two decades,
the UK legislation is about 15 years old, and that's just the legal
side of things, ignoring culture.  So why aren't people catching up
with this?

I think there are a number of answers to this, but they include

 *  Much of the information out there is about available applications
    and configuring them by/for the disabled user

 *  There would seem to be nothing in the acceptance process which means
    that inaccessible applications are rejected for inclusion in
    GNU/Linux.  [I don't know enough about that to be certain...]

 *  A quick search shows little for the programmer along the lines of
    how to make your application accessible.  I found Accerciser through
    http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/9991
    but good though that is, it is rather "after the event", as opposed
    to how to write in accessibility from the start.

 *  Much of the material is pretty intimidating for someone starting out
    in terms of the number of things you have to cover.  Just taking
    vision: speech access, braille access, large print access, the needs
    of colour blind people, be that red/green, blue/yellow, or total
    colour blindness.  [Then there's deafblindness...]

 *  The wider case for accessibility doesn't seem to be put forward
    enough.  Much is said about full participation of the whole of
    society, but that won't get most people to jump at the chance to
    add accessibility.  What seems to be left out is that something
    accessible is usually easier to script with another technology,
    because there are more hooks into it.  Textual interfaces can be
    screen scraped easily, etc.

A search for Accessibility Howto (a particularly blunt instrument for
this sort of thing) only turns up this on the second page:

http://www.faqs.org/docs/Linux-HOWTO/Accessibility-Dev-HOWTO.html

and it is dated 2002, which is probably rather old now.

I'd suggest that there is a need for people who know more about
GNU/Linux accessibility than I do [1] to write about it for a wider
audience to get the techniques out there.  "As a programmer this
will benefit you, because you can do [...] as a result of the
accessibility hooks being there."  Etc.

I don't think the problems will start to go away until more people
are aware of how easy the easy things are.  The difficult things 
will come later.

        Hugh

[1] I don't know much about the programming of accessibility yet.
I'm hoping this will change when (if?) I get more time.