In the past couple of years, there has been a lot of interest in the community as well as in various companies, with usability and accessibility compliance in desktop software. It is a great thing to be doing, but I think people have been skipping out on doing this in other aspects of the development process, particularly in the realm of technical specifications. A lot of the technical specifications we have out there right now, be they a part of the FreeDesktop project, or hosted elsewhere. This seems to stem from the writing standards for the sake of having standards mindset that John (J5) blogged about a few months back. We have a lot of specs now, some of which are quite good, some of which are gaining ground, and some of which are just starting out. Many of these, though, seem to have been written simply to resolve technical issues surrounding the integration of multiple environments, so that developers can point at specs and claim that their apps are compliant, rather than to really help the users use their computers better.

Perhaps it's time we start having usability reviews of specifications, as well, the same as we do for graphical applications. It would get more people involved in the creation of the specs, and would make them better for everyone, not just the people writing the related software.