Re: 2.1 Overview and proposal

Charles,

You can consider this discussion sufficient feedback on the IBM guidelines.
Unfortunately, though, due to other work, this will not get a high priority
right now.

When and if we do incorporate your feedback, it will probably go into
"recommended" techniques, not "required" techniques. I agree that you can
do drawing with a keyboard and in our consulting with IBM developers, we
require much more than the example would imply. Anything that has to do
with positioning and sizing objects on a workspace has to be keyboard
operable. I just don't think that free-form drawing has to be keyboard
operable as a "minimum" requirement for accessibility compliance. But it is
a good thing to add to our recommended techniques.

Andi
andisnow@us.ibm.com
IBM Accessibility Center
(512) 838-9903, http://www.ibm.com/able
Internal Tie Line 678-9903, http://w3.austin.ibm.com/~snsinfo


                                                                                                                                      
                      Charles                                                                                                         
                      McCathieNevile           To:       Andi Snow-Weaver/Austin/IBM@IBMUS                                            
                      <charles@w3.org>         cc:       w3c-wai-gl@w3.org                                                            
                                               Subject:  Re: 2.1   Overview and proposal                                              
                      01/08/2004 06:47                                                                                                
                      PM                                                                                                              
                                                                                                                                      




This seems like a misleading example.

The first programming I ever did was on drawing applications. Before mice,
when keyboards were considered a fine way to build an interface for
drawing.

Mouse keys are great, but at the time more serious options were required
since everybody expected to be able to use the applictions - being able to
turn a pointer for fine direction control, being able to make short or long
steps (because detail work requires short steps but long lines need to be
easier to make), change brush styles and colours, etc.

This is still important for people with mouse-control problems - drawing
with
a mouse is surprisingly hard. It's also the start of making drawing
possible
for people with significant visual impairment or total blindness.

And they were projects done by upper primary school (called elementary
school in the US) and high school kids.

(Andi, are the results of this discussion sufficiently connected to
function
as feedback on the accessibility guidelines, or should I separately look
for
a feedback mechanism for those?)

Cheers

Chaals

On Thu, 8 Jan 2004, Andi Snow-Weaver wrote:

>>From today's action items....
>
>The following exerpt is from the IBM Software Accessibility Guidelines
>techniques for keyboard equivalents [1].
>
>"The accessibility requirement is for all functions of the software, that
>are not inherently mouse functions, to be operable using only the
keyboard.
>Drawing is an example of a function that is inherently a mouse funtion.
>Direct manipulation, such as selecting text, is not inherently a mouse
>function."
>
>[1]  <http://www.ibm.com/able/guidelines/software/swkbdequiv.html>
>

Received on Friday, 9 January 2004 10:49:44 UTC