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

[Mario Lang]

Luke Yelavich <luke.yelavich at canonical.com> writes:

> On Mon, May 23, 2016 at 06:33:49AM AEST, Samuel Thibault wrote:
>> 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?
>
> The GNOME design team is regularly working with maintainers to improve
> application design. I have been thinking for a while now that someone who
> knows Orca well, and who knows how keyboard interraction with widgets should
> work, needs to get with the design team, and work out how keyboard navigation
> should function with particular widgets, and the way they are layed out in
> an application. Some of this work can probably be done within GTK itself,
> but certainly most of the work would need doing in the applications. This
> side would require someone who has a strong understanding of atk and GTK
> interraction, go into the code, and implement the desired outcome for
> keyboard navigation, as it is likely the app maintainer isn't sure how to
> do that.
>
> GNOME as a whole is also doing away with menus, however I don't think
> the equivalent keyboard access is known about widely, and if it is, its
> obviously not usable enough, and work needs to be done, probably with the
> design team to spec it out.
>
> I also think that the keyboard shortcuts for GNOME shell need investigating,
> and maybe adding to. It is currently possible to get to the GNOME top
> panel with Super + M, but that lands you in the message tray, and even
> though you can get to the rest of the panel from there, its still a clunky
> solution. Super + F10 works to get to the app menu, but you have to be in
> an app for that to work, you cannot use it on the desktop.

Thanks for this very accurate summary.  I think you have given the
best account of what is *actually* confusing people currently so far in this
thread.  +1 on everything you said.

-- 
CYa,
  ⡍⠁⠗⠊⠕