Accessibility Ra Ra Ra

Just been chatting to Brian about how we can re-invigorate some interest in GNOME accessibility. There seem to be a couple of misconceptions floating around:

  • We don’t hear much about accessibility on the mailing lists any more, and the Accessibility Project webpage hasn’t been updated in a year, so it must be ‘finished’
  • We don’t have to worry about it, because it’s all in billh’s head, and Sun are doing all the work anyway

None of these are true 🙂 While the bulk of the work in making gtk+ accessible is complete, that doesn’t automatically make every application accessible, and especially not if you use custom widgets. And nobody ever bothers to submit high and low contrast versions of their application icons to gnome-themes, for example. The list of currently open accessibility bugs speaks for itself.

We’d be interested to hear what you guys think you need to help you write more accessible GNOME applications. More information on how to test for accessibility? Better API docs? A better understanding of 508 legislation? GOK and Gnoperncius FAQs? More community involvement from the assistive technology hackers? Fire away and we’ll see what we can do.