[ Bill Haneman ]
> That strikes me as a surprising statement.  Of course it depends on what
> you mean by "partially sighted".

The people I am familiar with for example have light allergy. Large bright 
areas on the screen hurts their eyes  (e.g. selected text in the GNOME dark 
background colour scheme).

Some additional, intelligent false colour modes would be needed to invert only 
those parts of the screen with bright colours. But as far as I know, no 
existing screen magnifier that can this. Hopefully Gunnar will be able to 
come up with a solution.

> I really wonder where you got this data, it is at odds with the
> information I have received from domain experts.

It was one result of our usability test with partially sighted users, but I 
need to mention that the group was very small.

> Doing this requires some sort of re-rendering or overlay feature.  Until
> the recent introduction of XComposite this sort of thing was technically
> not very feasible on XWindows.

Gunnar's magnifier will include something based on XComposite and AT-SPI, and 
I suggested to make it also useful without the magnification.

> Theming is a very important issue and as you no doubt realize, it can be
> difficult to get applications to comply with themes, it seems that most
> applications want to define their own color schemes for at least some
> things.

We are planning to extend the colour schemes in KDE4 to contain enough colour 
roles for the applications, and to provide them with suitable functions for 
gettign additional colours if they really need them. It would be great if we 
could get a common solution for KDE and GNOME.

KDE can already apply its colour scheme to Gtk applications, but this is 
broken, and I have been unable to find a documentation of the Gtk theme 
settings.

> In general this is technically impossible for ANY onscreen keyboard in
> XWindows - at least, without XEvie.  I think that we may be moving GOK
> to this sort of default setting now that properly-working versions of
> XEvie are more widely available.

Using XEvie would still mean interfering with the core pointer. I meant cases 
where the on-screen keyboard does not aim to completely replace both the 
mouse and the keyboard. For example, the user enters text via keyboard, and 
uses a standard mouse, but there are also a few buttons in an on-screen 
keyboard for quickly inserting often-used words, or for typing in words in 
different alphabets, etc.

Olaf

-- 
Olaf Jan Schmidt, KDE Accessibility co-maintainer, open standards 
accessibility networker, Protestant theology student and webmaster of 
http://accessibility.kde.org/ and http://www.amen-online.de/
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