A recent concern of mine is the fact that innovation in terms of accessibility has come to a halt. Developers are more focused on making their apps look clean and less so on making them accessible. K understand. Most people don’t care for accessibility.
I would like to bring up a project that I find currently could at least somewhat benefit from accessibility enhancemenrs; Gnome. Some of you may not be familiar with Gnome so allow me to fill you in. Gnome is a desktop environment that uses Mutter as the window manager. Both projects are actively developed by the same team. During the Gnome 2 era, Gnome focused on being a DE for everyone; it was accessible to everyone. In 2010(?) Gnome decided to launch Gnome 3, what people considered the worst DE to have ever made it to Linux. Come late 2013 Gnome got its shit together and made Gnome 3 the single best DE I had ever used… Except for one thing. The magnifier was as glitchy as hell. Icons in the overview were cut off, and with 3.16 came a bug where the cursor moves when you scroll down a menu with it enabled. I finally filed a bug today. Point being, Gnome 2 was great and so is 3, but accessibility was given up for appearance. There are several other cases I can think of as well (KDE 3 to 4 for instance).
That was just an example :). Right now I’m using Plasma 5 and it is more stable… Just a little harder to work with.,. Old habits die hard I guess.
Q: What does this have to do with app design you Idiot?
A: It was to advise people that if they are planning a UI overall then to A either better how accessible it is or B if it is already accessible KEEP IT THAT WAY.
/end rant