GNOME Wins Award For Accessability Architecture

Motor writes: "The fine GTK/GNOME accessibility architecture work done by Sun Microsystems has won an award from the American Foundation for the Blind. See more details here. Accessibility is a vital feature for any desktop system hoping for widespread use, so this is great news."

Gnome2's simplicity is nice.

[reaper20]

I have to admit, the first time I started using G2D, I was irritated by the lack of config options, the fact that the buttons were all rearranged, and that I was lost in a once familiar desktop.

Now that I've been using it for a while, I think G2D is a classic case of 'less is more'. It feels light and less obtrusive, and everything does feel more consistent across the board. The rearranged Ok, Submit, Cancel (or whatever) buttons really took some getting used to, but now, I think I'm quicker at using the dialogs themselves, I know where each button will be.

I think developers should take a note from the Gnome team. The Mozilla Preferences, Gnome1.2 CC, KDE CC, and even Galeon's Pref panel are getting out of hand. If we want to be newbie friendly, make some sane choices the default, but leave the door open for advanced users to tweak.

Just the same, there's no excuse for that file dialog - it's embarrassing showing off Gnome to a newbie and having the user run into it and go "blech".

Congratulations!

[Black Parrot]

It certainly warms my heart to read -

"has raised the bar for the computing industry"

when written by non-geeks about an open-source product. (Remember that next time someone claims that open source only imitates, never innovates.)

BTW, there's an AFB announcement here [afb.org].

FWIW, I have a friend who has been totally blind since birth, and I had the privilege of helping him get started with UNIX. I have also watched him work with his reader (human) on a college programming assignment, and it's a thing both amazing and inspiring to watch.

XNews port?

[Jake96]

I've been trying lately to convert entirely to Linux for my desktop system, and one of my sticking points is that XNews is only available for Windows.

This ties in to this story because the author of XNews, Luu Tran, has cited Windows' accomodation of his severe visual impairment and Linux' lack thereof as the reason he has taken no interest in porting to Linux. Perhaps he'll check out G2 after hearing this news.

Re:XNews port?

[joeytsai]

You should use Pan. (Check it out here [rebelbase.com].) Pan is easily the best newsreader I've ever used, on any platform. Plus, the newer versions have been ported to G2D, which means it gets the accessibility for free (in theory, I haven't used a11y features in G2D).