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Open-HCI Announced

Usability
Usability

Aaron J. Seigo of the KDE project announces:

Seth Nickell (GNOME Usability Project), Havoc Pennington (Free Desktop,
GNOME), and JP Schnapper-Casteras (Free Desktop Accessibility Working Group)
and myself have been discussing the possibility of co-locating the KDE and
GNOME Human Interface Guides (HIGs).
The plan as discussed thus far is to have the two documents co-inhabit one XML
document. Within this document, each HIG will have its own sections as
appropriate and will remain available for separate viewing. The goal is to
have one URL (on www.FreeDesktop.org) and one document for developers to go
to for KDE and GNOME Human Interface Guidelines. We hope this site can
eventually house guidelines for multiple desktops and graphical toolkits.

The easier we can make it for developers to discover and follow such
guidelines the better it will be for Open Source desktops in general. Since
KDE apps are often run on GNOME and vice versa, developers should be able to
easily reference the guidelines for all the desktops they expect their app to
be run on.

Having a shared document will also allow us to start looking at commonalities
between the documents and perhaps create common chapters or sections on basic
guidelines and lessons that are desktop and toolkit-independent (e.g.,
accessibility and internationalization tips, general usability principles).

It will take some work to merge the documents, create a web site, and raise
awareness about the site for developers and people working on other non-KDE
non-GNOME HIGs. If you wish to join us in these efforts, please subscribe to
the open-hci@freedesktop.org email list via the web interface at:

https://listman.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/open-hci/

Best wishes to everyone!

- --
Aaron J. Seigo

Original Announcements
KDE Usability Lists
GNOME Usability Lists

Re: Open-HCI Announced

Hmmm. In general, I think the developers should conentrate more on changes that make the applications more usable, not the ones that make them look better.