Re: Widget rendering in GNUstep

[Chris Meredith]

On Sep 15, 2005, at 1:22 PM, comrade-gs@obverse.com.au wrote:


> It seems that you've gotten to know assistive technologies on a couple
> of different platforms - the current limited functionality seems to be
> both an opportunity and a problem within GNUstep and its  
> interaction with
> host platforms - so I'm hoping you could give some advice.
I guarantee nothing.  I myself use access technologies on both Win32  
and Mac OS X at the moment, but could not, say, get the version of  
Gnopernicus that was supposedly ported to Darwin to run on, well,  
Darwin.


> Cocoa code that uses the NSAccessibility protocol can't currently be
> ported - it hasn't been added to GNUstep-base yet, and touches enough
> classes in interesting ways that may lead to some issues like  
> additional
> instance variables being required. I'd like to see this added, despite
> any short-term pain. I'm also interested in finding out if there  
> are any
> free software assistive tools on Cocoa.

If you're refering to free in the GNU sense, I'm thinking not.   
VoiceOver, of course, comes free (in the cost sense) with Mac OS X,  
but I'd wager Apple isn't about to release the code for that into the  
wild any time whilst Hades remains above 0 degrees C.

> It's fairly straight-forward how this would play out on GNUstep on  
> MacOS
> X - but I'm more interested in how we'd interact with other  
> existing host
> platform capabilities. As a non-Win32 guy, I have no idea if  
> there's any
> simple or useful mapping into the Windows-native functionality. Any
> ideas?

I'm not entirely sure how this would play out even in OS X,  
particularly as, unless I'm mistaken, GNUstep applications are seen  
as X11 apps, are they not?

As someone else mentioned, you could implement IAccessible under  
Windows, but my head starts throbbing whenever I think about trying  
to implement IAccessible--partially because I can't find any  
definitive docs on it.  Perhaps someone on this list knows?

I suppose, alternately, one could go the route that Apple went and  
build a screen reading technology, such as it would be, i9nto GNUstep  
at the GNUstep level, which could work transparently of any platform- 
specific code, but I wouldn't know where to even start with something  
like that ... which may or may not be something that four or five  
cups of coffee might fix.  Still, I wouldn't object to some form of  
accessibility built into GNUstep.

-C-