Hi list,
The recent post about GTK on Win32 got me thinking of using that library in
Perl applications intended for Win32. I'd like to do a GUI in perl but such
that it is accessible to WIndows screen reader programs. That's because I
have to use one myself.
While the Win32::GUI package does work, it's still a bit early and
experimental. In particular, I haven't found out a way to load dialog
resources and have found that some window metrics appear to be mising.
TK, on the other hand, is well documented but many of their "standard"
controls are not accessible out of the box. Neither using NArrator nor with
any of the big three readers as far as I know. I've only tried TK sample
apps with Dolphin Supernova 6.x betas, though. Something as fundamental as a
push button doesn't look like a button to the screen reader and keybord
usage is slightly different, too.
So if someone is using GTK2 on WIn32, does that mean the accessibility
support inherent in GTK2 will migrate to Windows via Microsoft Active
accessibility (MSAA)? I suppose not. Most of my experiences about Win32
ported GTK2 apps have been rather negative. I'm not sure if it's just the
Win32 port or the use of custom controls in graphically intensive apps like
Dia.
By the way, even if GTK2 uses MSAA on Windows I reckon the support could
still vary widely. Most readers seem to rely on screen interception and
WIn32 hooks as the primary means of "data mining" with only limited MSAA
support. So, how Windows like the non-native GTK2 widgets appear is down to
the MSAA implementation in a particular reader. If the widgets were native,
however, they would have a familiar MSAA representation in addition to
supporting system-wide Win32 hooks well.
As a case study, the latest Visual Studio betas use MSAA to expose most of
the info on screen. However, current readers, at least on default settings,
cannot make too much sense of the form designer, which I find a bit ironic
considering that it's an MS app and an MS standard. But that is an OT:ish
quibble, anyway.
Any thoughts appreciated.
--
With kind regards Veli-Pekka Tätilä ([EMAIL PROTECTED])
Accessibility, game music, synthesizers and programming:
http://www.student.oulu.fi/~vtatila/
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