Having written one XUL application targeted specifically on blind users, I wouldn't recommend XUL for writing accessible applications unless one can't find anything better. Although XUL is basically accessible, there are minor annoyances which may make doing some things difficult to impossible.
The very first problem is that there is little real interest of supporting XUL in the accessibility infrastructure. Firefox and Orca developers naturally focus on HTML accessibility and XUL is not such a high priority area for them. Current JAWS support for XUL in Firefox 3 is poor, making some things inaccessible (NVDA is better in this area). Additionally, XUL is not that great development environment. JavaScript is handy for smaller tasks, but Java is IMHO much more suitable for larger applications. XUL doesn't handle widget tree switching very well, apparently some things can't be managed right after they are created thus making certain actions tricky and complicated. Developer documentation is far from perfect (e.g. in comparison with Java documentation). As for accessibility related items, there are sometimes problems with keyboard navigation, focus handling is still somewhat mystery to me, there is no Firefox and/or screen reader support for some important concepts like table navigation, reporting statusbar changes or character reading. Overall our XUL application works, but not perfectly, it's far from normally usable with JAWS and I was forced to use some ugly tricks, not speaking about time spent on experiments, googling and reporting. I agree that wxWindows is not really accessible. We've rejected it very soon for that reason. I've got no experience with Java accessibility so I can't compare it with XUL. One promising area, depending on the kind of application, may be HTML+ARIA. There are some widget toolkits based on this, it's backed up by a W3C standard and it is likely to be well supported at least in Firefox and Orca (better than XUL is). I'm just not sure about smooth interaction of HTML and JavaScript in comparison to XUL, namely about global key bindings and global focus handling, I have still to investigate how those things work. Finally, there is Qt. It's accessible on Windows and it should be accessible on Linux but AFAIK it doesn't work with Orca at all. Regards, Milan Zamazal _______________________________________________ Gnome-accessibility-devel mailing list [email protected] http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/gnome-accessibility-devel
