Please design an accessibility status menu

Bug #1067166 reported by Jeremy Bícha
30
This bug affects 5 people
Affects Status Importance Assigned to Milestone
Ayatana Design
New
Undecided
Unassigned
gnome-settings-daemon (Ubuntu)
Triaged
High
Unassigned

Bug Description

As a legacy from GNOME 2, Unity includes a hidden accessibility menu that is pretty much useless. To activate, open System Settings and click Universal Access. Switch to the Typing tab and enable accessibility features from the keyboard.

The a11y menu uses the blue accessibility icon. It should instead use the mono accessibility icon from unity-greeter (and a ubuntu-mono-light version will need to be created).

The a11y menu has only one button. Clicking the button opens a pop-up window with almost all of the choices broken since 11.10....and pretty much nobody noticed. (Screenshots attached)

We need a redesigned a11y status menu ("indicator").

We should look to GNOME's a11y menu for inspiration. We should seriously consider enabling the menu by default as it makes it significantly easier for someone to turn on the screen keyboard or mouse keys if for some reason their keyboard isn't connected or is malfunctioning. As a counterpoint, the "Remove Accessibility" extension is GNOME Shell's most popular extension but that is at least partly to blame that the developers didn't include a built-in way to disable it.

And by the way, unity-greeter has an a11y menu with three options:
Onscreen keyboard
High Contrast Ctrl+H
Screen Reader Ctrl+S

Revision history for this message
Jeremy Bícha (jbicha) wrote :
tags: added: needs-design
Revision history for this message
Jeremy Bícha (jbicha) wrote :
Revision history for this message
Jeremy Bícha (jbicha) wrote :
description: updated
summary: - Please design an accessibility menu
+ Please design an accessibility status menu
Alan Bell (alanbell)
tags: added: a11y
Revision history for this message
Alan Bell (alanbell) wrote :

Is there a particular attachment to the vitruvian man style accessibility symbol? I know Apple and Gnome use it (not sure who copied who) but the overall recognition level of it is very low. Could we use a mono version of the accessibility team logo? https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Accessibility/HeaderMain?action=AttachFile&do=get&target=accessibilityteam.png

Changed in gnome-settings-daemon (Ubuntu):
status: New → Triaged
importance: Undecided → High
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