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Ethereal-dev: RE: [Ethereal-dev] Ethereal and accessibility?

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From: "Sina Bahram" <sbahram@xxxxxxxxx>
Date: Wed, 26 Oct 2005 16:00:39 -0400
Hi Ulf,

That's fine ... I'm a programmer myself, and I understand what you're
saying.

I do find it rather unfortunate that the design of the application was not
done in such a way as to easily allow such a thing. But sometimes, proper
software engineering and getting a product out do conflict, especially when
this portion of your target audience is small. I would say no more than
maybe 100 or so users might benefit from such accessibility features
initially, and that's nothing compared to your ten's of thousands of users
in other fronts.

It is sad that such a powerful tool is unavailable to those users that could
benefit from this from an education point of view, a job point of view, and
a purely general benefit of learning and exploring their network for a
myriad of reasons.

I do thank you a great deal for taking the time to respond to my post, as I
know your time is very limited, and I wish you all the best.

Take care,
Sina

-----Original Message-----
From: ethereal-dev-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:ethereal-dev-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Ulf Lamping
Sent: Wednesday, October 26, 2005 3:44 PM
To: Ethereal development
Subject: Re: [Ethereal-dev] Ethereal and accessibility?

Sina Bahram wrote:

>Hi Mark,
>
>Thanks so much for your message.
>
>The finding of such hooks is up to the assistive technology and isn't a 
>problem, I would think.
>
>However, the problem is that none of the file menus, buttons, or other 
>controls in Ethereal read correctly. It's not like the technology 
>totally doesn't see them, because I can do such things as use a cursor 
>mode to see certain text in windows like "filter" and detect controls 
>like combo boxes, check boxes, and the like. However, interaction with 
>such controls is close to 0, I'm afraid to report.
>
>I will, apologetically, admit my familiar with the programming side of 
>accessibility is a great deal stronger on windows than it is on *nix, 
>but it be possible to find out if there is anything that ethereal can 
>do with respect to labeling buttons, making controls available, and so
forth?
>
>By the way ... If anyone can get gnopernicus working on gnome, you can 
>hear what I'm hearing, or lack there of.
>
>Take care,
>Sina
>
>  
>
Hi Sina!

Just my personal point of view...

While the number of occasional developers of specific dissector writers is
quite large (>500), the number of developers who are working on the Ethereal
core technologies is really small (only a few and doing it in their spare
time, like me).

There are still a lot of bugs in the code that will annoy every user (see
bugzilla) and the number of items in the wishlist is nearly endless.

I would guess that I could spend the rest of my life implementing all the
things I personally want to have. I can only speak for myself, but this is a
question of prioritizing the work to be done, and as you might guess (call
me egoistic) I tend to work on the things that I personally need.

Conclusion: Unless someone finds the time to implement accessibility (even
in a platform specific way that don't interfere with platforms might be ok),
you're just out of luck ...

Regards, ULFL

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