Orca Magnification Support Well Received at CSUN
Last year, I wrote about a push that Rich and Joanie did to improve the magnification support provided by Orca. This work not only included exposing more of the functionality provided by the gnome-mag project (see an old review of gnome-mag), but also working with Carlos, the past gnome-mag maintainer, to improve the gnome-mag implementation.
Last week, at the California State University at Northridge's Center on Disabilities Conference (aka CSUN) we were able to have direct interaction with magnification users, getting their direct feedback on the magnification work that Joanie and Rich had done since last year's conference. When I was talking with users, I'd let them drive the machine, which was a Solaris Express Developer Edition 01/08 machine (GNOME 2.20) with GNOME 2.22 bits for Orca and the AT-SPI infrastructure. Every single end user I talked to was very positive about the support. Some of my favorite quotes were (and I paraphrase because I didn't write these down word for word):
- I just wasted a lot of money buying a commercial product. This has all I need. -- student
- You've obviously focused on the needs of users versus putting in the useless bells and whistles needed to demo this to people who don't need magnification. -- technology evaluator
- This is actually very usable, much better than the joke you were showing last year. -- end user
All these were very warming to me, even the "much better than the joke you were showing last year" comment. At last year's conference, I had absolutely no reservations stating that Orca's magnification support was woefully inadequate. It was truly not a usable solution - we all knew it and we didn't pretend or present it in any other light. But, it was something that could serve as a tool to solicit input from end users. Since last year, we obtained comments and direction from end users, and Joanie was also able to bring her years of training end users to the table. While we still have work to do to improve magnification, the work that Rich and Joanie has obviously made Orca's magnification support something that real users find compelling and useful. Way to go, Rich and Joanie!
