Re: Scripting in Gnome

[Bill Haneman <Bill Haneman Sun COM>]

> Just thought I would add a pointer to my linux.conf.au slides, which 
> gave an overview of scripting with the a11y framework, along with some 
> specific examples:
>    http://www.daa.com.au/~james/talks/lca2004/

Hey James!

That talk is great, thanks for bringing it to my attention.  I didn't 
know you were working on this... the spell-checker is something I've 
been dying to do for literally two years, but I just haven't had time.  
Actually going the next step to make it correct the spelling errors 
shouldn't be hard at all, using the AccessibleEditableText interface.

As for what jamiemcc said, the issue of scripting objects in 
applications is one that assistive technologies need also.  Although we 
want the 'general case' to work well, and want to avoid _requiring_ 
special casing of objects on a per application, in the real world things 
aren't always that consistent.  Not only do apps behave differently, 
users actually often desire different behaviors when using different 
apps.  A screenreader user may say "I want this behavior when using 
OpenOffice or Abiword, but when using gnome-terminal that behavior is a 
pain, I want this other behavior instead".  So the need to identify 
specific objects and applications, and the ability to write 
per-application object scripts, exists in the accessibility domain too.  
I foresee that these problems will be addressed in assistive 
technologies, possibly via python scripts, so I think we should leverage 
one another's effort in these areas.

I am cc-ing Marc Mulcahy who has an interest in python scripting of 
accessible objects and applications too and has done some work in this area.

- Bill

> The talk was recorded, but I don't know when the audio will be made 
> available.
>
> James.