Re: GnomeFontSelector

[Bill Haneman <bill haneman sun com>]

Havoc Pennington wrote:
> 
> Bill Haneman <bill haneman sun com> writes:
> > I'm not sure that we can effectively go that route, without a lot of
> > addon code, since we need full accessibility features for
> > gnome-terminal.  Most likely AtkEditableText, AtkText, and possibly
> > AtkTable.
> 
> I don't think it's any different from zvt. What you would do with
> xterm in essence is make it a library, that you feed keyboard events
> which it uses to maintain terminal state, and it can draw a region of
> the terminal scroll area to an X drawable. You would then use that lib
> to implement a GTK-based terminal widget.
> 
> But it doesn't work unless you get the xterm librarification patch
> upstream into xterm, so we don't have to maintain the thing. ;-)
>
Hmm, I still think doing this with zvt makes more 'gnome-sense'. 
>
> I wouldn't expect a terminal to work well exposed via
> AtkText/AtkEditableText, though. Terminals aren't really editable. All
> you can do is add input to the end of them...

This depends on your model of what a terminal is.  The perspective of
screenreaders and assistive technologies is likely to be that the
terminal is whatever is onscreen, not the historical display.  Otherwise
you really can't support curses at all (and curses is a real headache
for accessibility).

Curses support is what requires the more complex support for the
AtkEditableText interface, but AtkText has no notion of appending
either, for that you need AtkEditableText.  

-Bill
 
> > Without an accessible terminal we are pretty much doomed to be
> > effectively "inaccessible".
> 
> This should be orthogonal to the i18n question, I hope. Most disabled
> users on Linux today seem to use the console in combination with
> Emacs, or that sort of thing, so I'd agree it's important.
> 
> > So what is happenning with libzvt2?  I know there is work going on on
> > that library, and supposedly it was the vehicle for fully
> > internationalized gnome-terminal support.
> 
> It is enough work to do that it couldn't even consider being done by
> 2.0, I would guess. The current gnome-terminal is internationalized,
> it just doesn't use UTF-8. To support an interface like AtkText we can
> convert to/from UTF-8. I think it's OK.
> 
> Hmm, important caveat: the i18n is broken out-of-box, but it works if
> you apply a bunch of hacks in the Red Hat RPMs, which we've submitted
> and no one has looked at yet.
> 
> Havoc