On Sep 15, 2005, at 1:22 PM, [EMAIL PROTECTED] 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-
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