That’s incorrect. On the contrary, I was one of those involved in the initial decision to reduce the number of icons in menus.

Because I’m really tired of being the target of rants and blamed for “lack of openness” i would suggest we hold a real usability study about this at GUADEC 2010 and finally put this behind us forever.

The argument that having no icons in menus would be bad for people that have dyslexiia is an interesting one and one that we did not consider at the time. I would like to see this tested as well.

What exactly is the ideal communication workflow here? Where exactly do GNOME developers need to announce that a discussion is taking place each and every time a change maybe made in order to ensure everyone who is potentially impacted gets their chance to argue the pros and cons of that change?

Do they really need to reach down into every single linux distribution that includes GNOME and announce every single change that is up for discussion? Isn’t this the sort of thing that your chosen distribution’s participants in Gnome development should be doing as a project liason to communicate to you as a distribution user? Who are the members of the Ubuntu community who are also active GNOME developers that you can rely on to filter information down into Ubuntu communication channels? Who from Canonical is going to the GNOME conferences? Are they reporting back to the Ubuntu community appropriately about changes under discussion? Why isn’t Martin reaching out specifically to those people and asking them to do a better job of being the bridge across projects?

There is no one place to send an notice that will catch all the Martins in the world… all the people who are potentially impacted by a design decision and want to impotently shake their fist in rage

Since Martin’s argument is essential accessibility with regard to dyslexia impaired users, the only real question is this, was this change communicated to gnome’s accessibility team for comment. If it was then the developer’s have done their due diligence and the question becomes does gnome accessibility team have a dyslexia resource member who can represent the needs of dyslexic users.

Well, I did it for you by emailing a popular Ubuntu blog with everyday Ubuntu readers. Take a look. The poll results are interesting, too.

http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2010/02/missing-menu-icons-what-are-gnome.html

The fact is that there are 10 million Ubuntu users out there, most of which aren’t involved in the community. Most of which will never hear of this change or have a say in it, or be able to do anything about. One day they’ll just upgrade to Lucid and wonder where the hell their icons have gone.

I’m not saying we should contact every. single. Ubuntu user, but a couple of surveys on ubuntuforums.org or the redhat forums couldn’t hurt. Hell, it only took my project a few days to get an enormous amount of feedback.

Popular Linux blog sites are usually too happy to help out projects with feedback from their reader base as well.

The fact is, if you’re a developer, you need to be a researcher too – and too many people ignore this fact, hence why we end up with a lot of useless or duplicated applications.

What you’re trying to say is like my government holding an election but only inviting the mayors of cities. Then afterwards they tell the rest of the population of the country “Where were you?” – but still try to label themselves a democracy.

And, for your information, the labels *cannot* be re-enabled any time – because the plan is to remove the interface tab of the appearance settings.

The IRC channels are #gnome-art and #gnome-design on gimpnet. Welcome!