Samuel Thibault <sthibault@debian.org> writes: > Cyril Brulebois, on Sat 21 May 2016 23:13:17 +0200, wrote: >> * brltty: >> - Install MATE desktop by default when brltty is used in d-i. >> * espeakup: >> - Install MATE desktop by default when espeakup is used in d-i. > > This change has triggered discussion on the debian-boot IRC channel. To > summarize, gnome people are surprised that MATE would be preferred by > blind people and wonder what they need to improve in gnome. I answered > that it was more a problem of general trend towards visual ways of > using the desktop, which can't be made really usable, but that's only a > sketchy answer, they need more precise examples. > > Could blind people here comment on this: why you don't use gnome and > prefer MATE instead? (or the converse of course, the idea is not to > blame gnome, we just want to select by default what is best for users, > according to their situation. I have to submit that I am not really qualified to do a comparison, as I have not used MATE personally. However, I can try to describe the regressions since GNOME2 that still haven't been fixed from a perspective of a *user* not actually familiar with the visual appearance of the current desktop: GNOME3 compared to GNOME2 feels very unpredictable. This might be because the way how keyboard based control is now been done has been revised significantly. I still haven't really figured out how to use *any* GNOME desktop features from the keyboard except Alt+F2. I basically use GNOME as a launcher for firefox. Partly because I do most of my work still in a console, but also because the way how I am supposed to use GNOME3 for anything else then launching a command by hand is totally mysterious to me. I don't know how to use the menu, if there is one. I vaguely remember someone showed it to me, but it definitely didn't work like expected and was apparently so unintuitive that I forgot again how to do that. I don't see anything on my "desktop" as I used to do in GNOME2. I am somehow suspecting that is because GNOME3 has changed the whole approach of how a desktop is supposed to "look", however, as a blind person, I don't really know either way. As I have been told, MATE is mostly how GNOME2 worked. And from that perspective, I can totally understand that blind people who use a typical graphical desktop for more then just launching a single app would prefer MATE over GNOME3. GNOME2 was actually very accessible in its final versions. The app launch menu was easily accessible, and even desktop widgets like GNOME Weather worked perfectly. So if you were into that thing of customizing your desktop to your needs, you could actually do it, even in an exploratory mood, without having to refer to documentation that probably doesn't exist anyway. That said, I am a little bit upset that GNOME people, after all these years of working on GNOME3, are still surpised that blind people are not happy with it. I would have assumed that if devs did honest research on that topic, they would immediately know that there is still quite a lot of ground to cover. Accessibility doesn't get simpler, it does get increasingly complicated with every new and fancy technology introduced. And with new ideas like Clutter, or the web framework switch we seem to see every 3 or 4 years now, a lot of work is needed to get accessibility up to a level of real usability. Whenever you deliberately introduce new and fancy technology, and the early GNOME3 days very much felt like that, you create a horrible situation for Accessibility. If you don't take Accessibility into account from the absolute first move you do, you will have to patch it up after the fact, which usually leads to horrible systems. Sorry, that is just a fact, I have seen this happen over and over again. While this is not really related to MATE vs GNOME3, I'd like to raise the web framework switch as an example to show that Accessibility doesn't really "work" yet because it is not treated as a first-class citizen in the requirement space: I dont quite remember when it exactly was, but the internal web rendering engine of GNOME switched from Mozilla to WebKit one day. When the switch happened, WebKit accessibility was not ready yet. During that time, things like the GNOME Help were simply not accessible anymore. I think this case should be clear enough. If, due to some other technical needs, we decide to switch to something but don't make Accessibility a first-class requirement, we end up leaving the users that depend on it totally in the dark for a while. While I can sort of sympathize with those that need to juggle human resources, the end result of ending up with an inaccessible HELP system is just totally unacceptable. As long as upstream projects are willing to do such gross moves, we really can not claim that these systems are Accessible. They might be Accessible by accident, for a few days. But for all we know, they might also stop to do so tomorrow. 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. This problem is not going to go away by discussing it. The only way we can improve Accessibility of mainstream upstream projects is to convince them to put more focus on the issues. These issues are often subtle and not easy to see if you are not doing honest testing. And many people don't know how to really test a screen reader, because if they still see the screen, they will fail to notice many accessibility issues. It just feels different to interact with a system if you don't see all its rich and colourful attempts to make things more clear to the user. I realize what I have said is actually quite vague. For a concrete list of problems, I think it would be best to * Go through the GNOME Bugtracker. * Do some real usability testing with blind users. Unsupervised solo experiments do often lead to very vague and emotional results. If we really want to have a quantified measure of where we stand, we should do it like academics teach usability. However, this very probably requires face-to-face time and rather careful preparation of use-cases. And it is probably something upstream needs to do, not Debian. > Ideally we'd just say "pick whatever, they're all good"). Of course. On a general note, while I can understand why people are pushing for a system that works like GNOME2, I think ultimately we will have to convince mainstream systems to make their offerings comparable. Choice is a good thing. But I am not sure it will be a good idea to move all blind people off to MATE by default, this takes the pressure away from GNOME. -- CYa, ⡍⠁⠗⠊⠕
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