Hi all,
With all the discussion recently about the hud, and how its not accessible, I've been looking at the hud code for Unity 2D, investigating why its not accessible. It turns out that the Unity 2D devs did indeed do their part in making sure the hud is accessible as possible, however the results, whilst being indicated as buttons, do not have any text spoken. This is because the Unity 2D devs decided to use a text string different to what visually gets shown, for various reasons. The problem is, that this text string coming from the hud service process is currently always an empty string.
Setting about working out an alternative, I realized that at this late stage of precise development, this could not be properly solved without getting a fair number of exceptions in the form of feature freeze exceptions, UI freeze exceptions, as well as getting strings translated. In addition, I have not yet been able to come up with a way to audibly indicate hud search results. Sure I have an idea, but I am not sure if there should be more detail.
So at this point, I think we'd be better off disabling the hud for screen reader installs, due to the above. I.e, since we don't have time to work out an audible representation of hud results, and get it implemented and tested, I think disabling the hud is a better course of action. I'd rather have the hud available when its fully accessible with results that Orca users can understand, than have a half-baked accessible implementation that could confuse users.
I will start a discussion about how we could best represent hud results in another thread.
Luke
