Hi list,
Ok, I just installed Active TCL with the default settings and tried out both
the TK samples of Active TCL and the Synopsis code of Perl's TKX package.
But when it comes to accessibility, I'm very disappointed. I'm using Dolphin
Supernova 6.x but I doubt Jaws would be able to handle things any better as
TK seems so fundamentally inaccessible. Warning subjective ranting ahead:
The good news, compared to Swing, the widgets do look very much like their
Win32 counterparts to me and TK perfectly respects my color scheme, too.
However, very few controls are accessible. The title bars and some HTML
areas seem to be but virtually nothing else is. static text, the various
buttons and text fields just don't seem to be there as far as the screen
reader goes. It announces right from the start no focus detected and is not
able to read any control text, type and state, navigate between the controls
or manipulate them. Even when using a screen reader specific navigation mode
called virtual focus, it doesn't go beyond the title bar in most cases. I've
changed the screen reader map file to MSAA Application with no visible
improvements.
Also some gripes about TK. As is the case with so many custom GUIs that try
to be Windows like, it feels sort of clumsy in places. Edit areas don't seem
to have the familiar context menu with choices like select all, copy or
undo. SCroll bars don't have context menus either when even Notepad does
have them. KEybord usage is a bit patchy, too. In the 50 States example, the
arrow keys, as well as, pg up/down and home/end don't move the selection in
the list box. Neither is item searching by rapidly typing in one or more
letters implemented.
Enough gripes. It seems obvious to me that the only accessible GUI library
is Win32::GUI at least as far as perl on Win32 systems is concerned.
However, I'd like to design GUis comfortably without having to rely on font
properties and do some guess work as to where a control will be layed out.
In Java programming, I like Swing's layout manager abstraction but haven't
seen it cloned anywhere else including dot net, tk and Win32::GUI. As far as
static dialogs go, another thing I like is designing a dialog visually in
the Visual Studio 6 resource editor. It is just very convenient even if it
requires precise mouse movement and heavy magnification in my case. But is
there support in Win32::GUI for loading such dialog resources? What if I
import the relevant functions from the real Win32 API, will I be able to
attach Win32::GUI event-handling code to the controls in my dialog
resources?
Any help greatly appreciated.
System:
-HP NX8220 laptop with 1 GB of RAM
-Win XP SP 2 Pro English with latest fixes
-Dolphin Supernova 6.03
-Active State Perl 5.86
--
With kind regards Veli-Pekka Tätilä ([EMAIL PROTECTED])
Accessibility, game music, synthesizers and programming:
http://www.student.oulu.fi/~vtatila/
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