Submitted by The GNOME Foundation is running an accessibility outreach program, offering USD 50000 to be split among individuals. This program will promote software accessibility awareness among the GNOME community as well as harden and improve the overall quality of the GNOME accessibility offering. The program is sponsored by GNOME Foundation, Mozilla Foundation, Google’s Open Source Program Office, Canonical, and Novell. This is the second in a series of outreach programs coordinated and run by the GNOME Foundation.
Seriously…until GNOME can be drive by a _default_ set of both keyboard _and_ mouse commands like Windows can (e.g. access the GNOME Foot “start” menu, switch between programs, resize/maximize/minimize/move/close windows, traverse menus, etc.) even a minimal set of accessibility is not there. (KDE is little better, btw!)
Then add in the screen readers and other requirements for full handi-cap accessibility and the system will be good to go.
And honestly – that is perhaps one of the biggest issues for Linux/KDE/GNOME/X11 as a desktop platform – the most basic mouse OR keyboard accessibility is not there by default.
(Yes, I know you can map keys, etc. using X11 to do a lot of it. My point is the _default_ setup. KDE is nice in that it gives a couple options to chose from during first run…but they still lack basics like accessing the “start” menu, which is an absolutely essential task.)
Hopefully this sponsorship will resolve the issue – perhaps put KDE in the hot-seat to do the same!
All the things you ask *are* available by default. Here are the key bindings:
http://www.novell.com/coolsolutions/tip/2289.html
along with the corresponding KDE bindings. If you don’t have access to those, then your distro has messed up your GNOME install.
Nope – got those. Notice that the “KDE K Menu” and GNOME Foot Menu are not on the list? That’s the kind of thing I’m talking about. And I’ve seen this issue on more than one distribution.
There is no “foot menu” in GNOME — never was. The “Applications” menu *is* what you call the foot menu (it used to be called Programs and had a foot as part of the dropdown).
Once you’re on this menu (either through the shortcut or the mouse), you can move around to your hearts content with the cursor keys.
“Notice that the “KDE K Menu” and GNOME Foot Menu are not on the list?”
Yeah, the foot menu thing has already been answered. But it just so happens you are wrong about the KDE menu too. For some reason it’s not first in the list but it’s there. Same shortcut as the Gnome applications (foot) menu: alt-f1
Learn something new everyday.
Wish they’d list it as a “start” menu (in quotes!) in the setting system too – just so people not so familiar with that terminology would be able to find it easier.
By the “Foot” menu, do you mean the “Applications” menu? And if so, how is Alt-F1 not a suitable shortcut for it?
Window manipulation is there too — in fact, I’m pretty sure Metacity uses the same shortcuts as Windows (e.g. Alt-F4 to close a window). Give this a read:
http://library.gnome.org/users/gnome-access-guide/latest/keynav-1.h…