[pve-devel] Work on accessibility features

[Mitch]

Hi,

On 2/20/17, Lindsay Mathieson <lindsay.mathieson at gmail.com> wrote:
> I would have thought the command line interface more useful for
> disability access.

You would think so, but assistive technology has really made huge
improvements over the last decade or so. There are now open source
alternatives in the form of NVDA for Windows and Orca for Linux that
are almost as good, and in some cases better than their expensive
commercial competitors. There is also very capable screen reading
technology built in to Android and iPhone right out of the box.

The interesting thing is that web technology has also evolved rapidly
in that time, web apps now function like desktop apps, and you aren’t
just dealing with HTML pages with a little JS here and there any more,
you are dealing with full client side apps running in a browser, and
because there is so many different ways to do that with your huge
choice of frameworks out there, ExtJS, Ember, Angular, Backbone,
React, GWT, etc… all of which implement accessibility slightly
differently, as do the browsers, IE, Chrome, Firefox, Safari, it’s
hard for the assistive technology to keep up.

Fortunately ExtJS does a pretty good job at staying reasonably screen
reader friendly, except when developers need to implement their own UI
components that aren’t part of the framework to fill a particular
requirement.

I don’t think PVE will require any major patching to make it friendly
to assistive devices, a few minor tweaks should be all that is
required for 95% accessibility, and then you always have the command
line for any edge cases that fall outside that.