About the accessibility issues, here are some short answers. Modern GUI toolkits support accessibility well. Gtk+ supports it best via AT-SPI service/API, which should be installed enabled for Orca to work. So, in theory, every program using "standard built-in Gtk+ widgets" should get the accessibility support without further work. However, the features of the standard widgets are very limited sometimes and we need to implement some custom widgets ourselves. For custom widgets, we need to implement all of the accessibility support ourselves with ATK, which is not as well-documented as GTK+ and there are no good tutorials for it. Besides, implement those ATK interfaces with GObject type system is really a pain and it can make the source code messy. Doing a11y support for your custom widgets actually requires leaning another new toolkit, ATK and it takes much time. Lxpanel and pcmanfm desktop icons have severe a11y problems because they both use several custom widgets since Gtk+ did not provide widgets with similar functionality we need. I talked with some other Gnome devs in the past and they suggested a good way to overcome this, a special UI for blind users using standard Gtk+ widgets only. I does not matter how the UI "look" like since it's only "saw" by the screen reader programs, not the users. We don't even need themes or icons. This is an easier approach avoiding touching ATK, but we need to duplicated many code and build a special version, which is as complicated. Though we can dig into gnome projects to see how they do it with ATK, it takes much time and that explains why it's always a work in progress.
Previously I did lxpanel2 and I tried to reuse as many standard gtk+ widgets as possible in the hope of fixing this issue, but due to some problems of gtk+ 3 and vala, the development is a little bit stalled recently. :-( About the recent discussion on Qt, it also has AT-SPI2 support if you install the qt-atspi plugin. It works out of the box with orca, but it's not as complete as gtk+/gnome. However, the Qt/KDE guys are trying to improve it. So, we do consider a11y very important, but we need more help from experts in this area since solving this requires additional technical knowledge. Patches are welcomed, if you guys have some. :-) ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Introducing AppDynamics Lite, a free troubleshooting tool for Java/.NET Get 100% visibility into your production application - at no cost. Code-level diagnostics for performance bottlenecks with <2% overhead Download for free and get started troubleshooting in minutes. http://p.sf.net/sfu/appdyn_d2d_ap1 _______________________________________________ Lxde-list mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/lxde-list
