[Kde-accessibility] Re: KDE screen resolution policy

[Frans Englich]

On Friday 02 January 2004 14:13, Bill Haneman wrote:
> Hi, Happy New Year everyone (and an early Happy New Year to those in
> China :-)
>
> I'd like to comment on the 640x400 accessibility issue.  I agree that
> this is desirable for
> accessibility, but since 640x480 is getting less and less common,
> perhaps 800x600 is
> a better target for now.  A 'virtual' 800x600 (with a physical 640x480),
> which I believe
> XFree supports now, may be a good compromise, since it allows
> applications to write
> to a somewhat bigger virtual area in which the 640x480 area is panned.

The KDE policy is that individual windows must run in 640x480 and the whole 
DE/Display in 800x600, so I guess it fullfills your suggestion. For details, 
see:
http://developer.kde.org/documentation/standards/kde/style/basics/windows.html#win_size

>
> What's possibly even more important is support for larger fonts; 12
> point isn't usually
> big enough for users with vison difficulties, unless fullscreen
> magnification is available
> (KMag can't do that yet, and even gnome-mag/gnopernicus has a hard time
> unless you
> have two framebuffers).



>
> I think 18 to 20 point fonts are a reasonable target.  This will
> (especially in conjunction
> with 800x600 displays) probably be harder to accommodate than just
> 640x480, but it's
> really important.  I would argue that working well with such large fonts
> is actually more
> critical to accessibility than working with a limited screen resolution.

It would not surprise if that was correct. In either case readability is an 
important issue. One thing I've noticed especially is the date in the clock 
applet - by default it is in 8pts which is way to small for most users IMHO. 
I will soon suggest a larger font(but that will look ugly) or a removal(do 
not show date as default). It has an estethic advantage too, it looks 
cleaner.
Perhaps there should be a minimum font size for text which is used for 
viewing.


			Frans