Re: [tdf-discuss] Accessibility (was Java dependency)

[Michael Meeks <michael.meeks@novell.com>]

On Wed, 2010-11-03 at 02:08 +0000, jonathon wrote:
> > Is there a better alternative for Windows users?
> 
> Roughly five years ago, IBM promised to deliver a better A11Y solution
> for Windows to OOo.  AFAIK, that hasn't yet happened.

	Agreed - this will be the best solution in the end. Novell (with
Oracle, and RedHat) initially wrote-out the Java dependency for a11y on
Linux, in favour of a native atk+ bridge - which (for all its troubles)
performs better, and is actually widely deployed (giving us lots of nice
bug reports). Clearly we need the same for Mac and Windows.

	Writing such a native bridge is not -that- hard, and I'm not aware of a
better sol'n than java for Mac - if anyone is interested in doing a bit
of socially useful hacking, here they need to read:

	vcl/unx/gtk/a11y/*
and:
http://developer.apple.com/library/mac/#documentation/Cocoa/Conceptual/Accessibility/cocoaAXIntro/cocoaAXintro.html

	And get in touch :-)

> Basically, you have to throw away _all_ of the existing code, and
> rewrite it from scratch, with i18n, l10n, and a11y as the core
> requirements. [Retrofitting a11y, i18n, or l10n always requires more
> time and effort that starting from the beginning, with no code at all.]

	Nah - it is not this bad; there is a reasonable internal a11y
structure: it has several obvious weaknesses, but perhaps we can fix
some of them if we are past the religion of eternal UNO API stability in
this area.

> Something I hadn't thought of earlier, was what the Libre Colour palette
> looked like to a person that was colour blind.  My colour blind palette
> only covers the "websafe color palette". None of the colours are in that
> palette.

	Good thinking; it would be great to ping Christoph Noack on that
presumably he has thought at least a bit about it - the monochrome
outline is quite good I imagine.

	Anyhow - a really good write-up; if you want to get involved hacking on
this, it'd be much appreciated.

	ATB,

		Michael.

-- 
 michael.meeks@novell.com  <><, Pseudo Engineer, itinerant idiot



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