John, thanks very much for your thoughtful / thorough note. :)
So, do you know whether VO users are able to tab between Swing
controls in your apps on the Mac? If so then I'll send my scratch
code along to see if I'm doing something wrong, but I don't think so.
Also, might you point me in the right direction to do the self
voicing thing?… I.E. Locating / installing the sdk for the speech
engine etc?… -as well as locating some basic tuts on working with it
from within java?…
Though I love GUIs, I had lousy luck with a previous ver of Eclipse
in Leopard, so have been compiling java via the command line and
editing / coding in TextEdit. I'd occasionally use XCode, which I
like, but was looking for something that might be more tailored for
java, specifically. Thus my refreshed curiosity with Eclipse.
Anyway, thanks very much for your offers of help. I sure do
appreciate it!…
Smiles,
Cara :)
On Dec 28, 2008, at 7:55 AM, John Bannick wrote:
Cara,
A caveat re SWT, Java, and Eclipse.
I recently read that there are problems with the latest Eclipse,
Java 6,
and SWT on the Mac. Can't remember the details, but will post them
here
tomorrow if I find them.
By way of introduction, I code in Java in Eclipse on the Mac all day
for
the Feds, for a cross-platform Mac/Win/Linux product.
Have been coding Java professionally for 10 years, coding Swing
since it
was in Beta, and even done a little SWT.
The blind-accessible computer games I build for my other job at 7-128
Software all use Java / Swing, self-voice using Free-TTS, and work
with
JAWS on PCs.
So if you have any questions about Java, Swing, or accessibility
coding
hacks, please do ask.
That being said, I'm a newbie to really coding for the Mac, as
opposed to
on the Mac. I know little about VoiceOver. A colleague at Perkins
School
for the Blind says that someone at Apple wants to talk to us about
making
our games work well with VoiceOver. So I expect to get into that next
month.
To respond to your specific questions:
• would using SWT take care of my above issues so that my GUI would
act more like a native Cocoa L/F with VO?
SWT should not give you any functionality re Cocoa or VO that Swing
doesn't.
And I'm not a Swing fanatic. It is said that SWT is "more native"
That's
just not true, as anyone who's actually coded in both knows.
• Is anyone successfully using Eclipse with VO, and is it possible to
use SWT outside of Eclipse. I'd think so…
Yes. You can use SWT outside of Eclipse.
It is a GUI API that is very much like Swing.
I am sighted, so I don't use VO with Eclipse.
However, my professional opinion is that the Eclipse GUI is
sufficiently
well organized, and IBM is sufficiently accessibility-sensitive, that
Eclipse could be driven by ear. The caveat there being that Eclipse
might
have one or more features that are, for whatever reason, not
blind-accessible.
• Lastly, if these aren't good options, is there a way to have the
system self voice these controls I'm concerned with via Java? -
Perhaps with Java-Cocoa?…
Don't know about this one. But will find out when I talk with Apple.
Oops, getting called to breakfast!
Good luck,
John Bannick
Chief Technical Officer
7-128 Software
www.7128.com
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