From: Dominik Riebeling <dominik.riebeling_at_gmail.com>
Date: Sun, 25 May 2008 12:18:52 +0200

On Sun, May 25, 2008 at 1:16 AM, Daniel Dalton <d.dalton_at_iinet.net.au> wrote:
> Anyway, this isn't really related because at-spi is the problem, it doesn't
> provide accessibility to qt, only gtk I believe...

I checked the orca website a bit: the problem is not AT-SPI itself. Qt
implements this as well as GTK. The main problem is the IPC backend:
while orca, GTK and friends use CORBA Qt (and KDE) uses D-Bus.
Interestingly Bonobo/ORBit, which is the CORBA component currently
used, is a deprecated component of Gnome. Reading the information
around it's likely AT-SPI using D-Bus eventually. Some more
information can be found here:

http://live.gnome.org/GAP/AtSpiDbusInvestigation/Background
http://www.linux-foundation.org/en/AT-SPI_on_D-Bus

> No, accessibility on linux is very good with gtk, and the command line! I use the cmd line
> all the time for most tasks.

Well, I never understood why a blind guy would want to use a
GUI-centric OS like windows anyway -- it's much easier to extract the
text from the command line as it isn't rendered to graphics and you
don't make heavy use of windows, isn't it? But this obviously doesn't
help with our original problem ;-)

> So if you had decided to use gtk, they would be accessible, but I guess it wouldn't be
> as cross-platform?

The old version of rbutil used wxwidgets. This uses GTK on linux, but
it's a pain for deployment -- we weren't able to provide a linux
binary at all. On windows it uses native widgets (IIRC), but so does
Qt. Using native Gtk would've made deployment on windows a bigger
hassle. Also, I'm not sure about accessibility of Gtk on windows. At
least the switch to Qt was made due to pragmatic reasons -- easier
deployment is one of them, another one is that more developers are
familiar with Qt. As far as I can tell that switch gave quite some
development boost. Plus, it looks much nicer IMO ;-)

Sorry, my first post might have been better structured: we know that
accessibility on linux is bad. We know that accessibility is working
to some degree on windows -- that's the platform I tried myself and
even on windows with MSAA the results vary greatly depending on the
screen reader used; but I experienced this also for other
applications. As the main target platform is windows it's kinda wrong
to talk about "major problem accessing rbutil with screenreaders" (not
quoting you) in general -- but we still lack help on accessibility. If
anyone is interested, please jump in.

Alex is trying to run the vbs scripts so he is on windows -- thus
there is accessibility to some degree, so he should test himself.


 - Dominik
-------------------------------------------------------------------
List admin: http://cool.haxx.se/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/rockbox
FAQ: http://www.rockbox.org/twiki/bin/view/Main/GeneralFAQ
Etiquette: http://www.rockbox.org/mail/etiquette.html
Received on 2008-05-25