Re: [Caml-list] [ANN] Prose v1 - a collaborative text editor

["Sébastien Hinderer" <Sebastien.Hinderer@inria.fr>]

Dear Adrien,

Many thanks for your prompt and positive response!

Adrien Nader (2017/07/11 15:09 +0200):
> Hi Sébastien,
> 
> On Tue, Jul 11, 2017, Sébastien Hinderer wrote:
> > Dear Adrien,
> > 
> > I find it awesome that such a tool is developed in OCaml and wish it all
> > the possible success.
> > 
> > Has accessibility already been taken into account? Is there any plan on
> > this for future developemnt? I am asking because most of the pads I know
> > lack this feature.
> 
> Accessibility has not really been taken into account so far. However I
> definitely see that as an issue. My main problem with doing it is that
> this is not a field I know and I definitely welcome pointers to
> resources I could learn from.

Well, I am not an expert either. I mean, I face accessibility issues as
a user, but that does not necessarily mean I know how to fix them as
people tend to believe. I should probably learn that, too.

The W3C has a work group on accessibility, the WAI (Web Accessibility
Initiative).

This group has published:
- The WCAG, Web Content Accessibility Guidelines:
https://www.w3.org/WAI/intro/wcag
- Tge ATAG (Authoring Tools Accessibility Guidelines):
https://www.w3.org/WAI/intro/atag
 
And a few other documents that may be a bit less relevant here.

I also did a little presentation on accessibility. It is not focused on
web accessibility but may be of interest to those curious about how
blind people use computers:
http://brl.thefreecat.org/conf.mkv

The presentation is in french, sorry about that.

And the video has a bug (when I run X the content of the screen is not
displayer), I hope this will be fixed soon.

> Actually, my own machines typically force white text on dark
> backgrounds, including for web pages. As such I already avoid things
> that wouldn't render properly (CSS and font icons) and try to label
> interactive elements (although I haven't managed to do it for everything
> yet, see e.g. https://gitlab.com/adrien-n/prose/issues/42 ).
> 
> That said, this also depends on Ocsigen and I don't know how well it
> fares on this. IIRC there are APIs related to accessibility but I
> haven't looked at them and I can't tell whether they cover everything
> needed (it's not unlikely they do).
> 
> It's also important to take the JS library into account. I think it
> doesn't fare too bad in this aspect but I haven't checked properly.
> 
> There are also some features that I don't know how to make accessible.
> On a graphical display, and especially with colors, it is easy to notice
> edits from others without being interrupted. This relies either a lot on
> peripheral vision, or on eyes being able to quickly jump to the proper
> position when the text suddenly shifts after words or lines are
> inserted. Hopefully, while these situations happen, they are not the
> norm. Material to learn from is welcome for this too.

I am not sure how to make such features accessible either. Intuitively,
I have always thought that a pad that can be modified by several persons
in parallel is intrinsically inaccessible. However, I don't know whether
this is actually true or not. And even if it's true, there may be some
kind of "best effort" way to provide at least some degree of
accessibility. I will investigate on this.

> All in all, this is going to take a few months to get into the code but
> again there are many things that still need to be done.

I think it's really not a big deal if it takes time. Roughly speaking we
start with "nothing" (no accessible alternative at all) so any single
thing happening would be an improvement over what currently exists.


> rhere is already a ticket on gitlab about this:
> https://gitlab.com/adrien-n/prose/issues/24 . It is not very detailed
> and I guess I'm both missing some things and wrong on others so input is
> welcome. :)

When you are blind, sometimes it's even difficult to simply
figure out what exactly is not working or what you don't have access to,
because you don't have access to it. I mean, say there is a button to
underline something. If the screen reading system does not present this
button to me, I won't be able, by myself, to tell you that this button
is not accessible, because I don't even know it's here.

That's why, IMO, sometimes the most effective way to progress is to
physically meet and see together what works and what does not. If you
are in Paris and would like to, we could organise such a meeting.

Cheers,

Sébastien.