. I'm a computer science student at the moment and am frustrated by
the fact that I, as a totally blind person, cannot use cocoa's
interface builder. I wouldn't care, except that there seems to be
no way to code an interface by hand like there is in most GUI
toolkits unless I write in Pascal--which I definitely do not want
to do.
Hi Jacob,
Yes, unfortunately, you're correct. Actually, I mentioned this
limitation in a recent post but stopped short of discussing further
since I am not a blind developer and don't regularly use VoiceOver
with the development tools. Travis first raised the issue a few
months back.
yuck. I certainly don't blame you for not wanting to write in Pascal.
Is there a way to design Cocoa interfaces other than with the
interface builder app? If so, I'd love to try it.
At the moment, I don't believe there is...perhaps Travis (when he's
not so busy with his own CS coursework) will correct me if I'm wrong.
It sure would be be nice if .nibs weren't closed/proprietary.
Also, there was someone--not sure who--on this list who said that
making XCode accessible was one of the improvements coming in OS X
10.5. Can anyone confirm this? Well, I should say making interface
builder accessible, as the main XCode application itself doesn't
really seem to present that many accessibility issues.
Yes, from the accessibility standpoint, IB seems the real problem.
Apple needs to open the .nibs (which, frankly, doesn't strike me as
particularly likely) or update the app to make it accessible. Have
you submitted a request to Apple through ADC? You might also try
getting a note through to Apple's Developer Relations - Accessibility
Section. I'd probably be out of line posting contact info for
specific folks in that section (so I won't)...but if you manage to
get a message through to them those folks are super-receptive,
accessibility-savvy and will take your request seriously.
Joe
Later
