MATE chosen by default instead of gnome for blind people [Was: Debian Installer Stretch Alpha 6 release]

Samuel Thibault sthibault at debian.org
Sun May 22 20:33:49 UTC 2016


Mario Lang, on Sun 22 May 2016 21:56:00 +0200, wrote:
> What I am trying to say is, if a desktop wants to provide Accessibility
> that is actually useful to users, they will have to invest more time
> into it then they currently are willing to do.

Well, perhaps it's not a question of time, but of methodology.

>  * Do some real usability testing with blind users.
>    Unsupervised solo experiments do often lead to very vague and emotional results.

Yes, I'd say that's why the lack of precise feedback for gnome: users
are simply lost in the new interface, and can't provide anything useful.

I'm wondering: do gnome maintainers actually make real face-to-face
testing with blind users?  As Jean-Philippe Mengual said, there is a lot
of work done on the technical side, perhaps it's just lacking actual
testing with real users?  I'd say it's perhaps unfair to suggest that
gnome maintainers need to spend more time than they already do (I don't
know if we know how much they do), and that the issue is rather that
there is no face-to-face feedback?

Also, is there a guide for blind people new to gnome3, teaching how the
interface is working?  If there is one, we need to point to it from
the debian accessibility wiki.  If there is none, then that's possibly
simply what Jean-Philippe and Mario are lacking?  One issue when
introducing a completely different way to interact with the desktop,
as gnome3 did, is that it introduces new concepts.  These concepts
are typically designed for sighted people first (I'm not saying that
gnome3 did it this way, I don't know, I only guess that's probably how
it happened), and are thus made to be intuitive for sighted people.
Maintainers then forget that they are probably not intuitive for
non-sighed people, and the new concepts thus *have* to be explained to
them.  And I'd say you can not write a guide explaining the new concepts
without actually discussing face-to-face with a really blind user who
never *saw* the new interface, so that he pinpoints the things which
need to be explicited because they are not obvious when you can't see
(and that you can not un-understand once you have understood them, and
thus would forget to mention them). That "freshman" step is required, I
believe.

Samuel



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