Why we all need an accessibility Eclipse
I just read Wayne’s nice blog about accessibility in Eclipse.
As some of you may know, before moving to CS I did three years of Industrial Design. A lesson I always remember is that its a mistake to regard accessibility as a secondary design function. Rather, one must realize that we are all disabled, to some degree, at some point. It could be weak eyesight, RSI, a broken wrist from a skiing accident, tired after a long day… Good design incorporates accessibility from the start.
For example, doorknobs are bad, but door handles are good. Doorknobs require grip strength, thus fail if you have arthritis, hands full with grocery bags, cream on your hands… while as door handles are usable with an elbow, a hip, a cane. Its not that they’re designed to be used in these manners, its rather that the ergonomics are gentler and thus lends itself to different ways of using it.
Eclipse is generally regarded as one of the more accessible IDEs, and I know that the platform and JDT UI teams have always taken it quite to heart (others teams as well, no doubt). But as someone who has attempted to use Eclipse in large font/low color mode, I would say its accessible but not terribly usable. We’d make certain design trade offs differently if we were working in that mode all the time. For example, maybe wouldn’t show icons in the explorer since they don’t provide enough information to warrant the (now limited) real estate. Maybe the shape of the UI is wrong and we shouldn’t use multiple view stacks, instead focusing on a single display area/stack with changeable content like a web page. We’d likely get rid of some of the pretty but extraneous, space hogging border treatment.
It turns out that if you try to run Eclipse on a low res device like the Eee PC, you’ll hit much of the same issues. Thus a device change brings with it some similar trade offs as visual accessibility. Its like as if using the Eee PC suddenly makes your vision poor. You become “disabled”. Designing for accessibility meanwhile has the positive side effect of increasing usability on the Eee PC.
In the best design, accessibility emerges naturally as the outcome of a highly flexible and broadly usable UI. Ideally our UIs would transition gracefully to these different usage contexts.
Everyone then wins.
Posted October 16th, 2008 by Kevin McGuire in category: Accessibility, Usability
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