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

[Luke Yelavich]

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.

Luke