Re: [g-a-devel]Support for Color in ATK

[Bill Haneman <bill haneman sun com>]

Draghi Puterity wrote:
> 
> Hi, and a happy new year !
> 
> My oppinion is that color is important for accessibility.
> 
> We will also certainly have (missbehaved?) applications which will use color
> to denote some kind of state (BearShare under Windows is comming into my
> mind - you have some kind of coloured progress bars which denotes the server
> bandwith [progbar color] and the available slots [progbar width]). But there
> will be more like this, I'm sure.

This is not reason to expose color information in our accessibility
interfaces; the information exposed should be state information.

Realize that in situations like this we must (internally in the
accessibility support libraries) obtain the color information from the
UI components in the first place, which will not always be possible for
ill-behaved applications.  Behaviors like this are accessibility bugs
which should be logged against the applications themselves.

The point I am trying to make here is that the presence of explicit
color information in our API is not the same as being able to
expose/provide that information for a given application.  Ill-behaved
applications can and do use non-GTK-widget means of displaying color, in
which case we cannot provide that information without source changes to
the application, in which case it is preferable to expose the state
information via other means than color.

In other words in the more ill-behaved situations we can't get to the
color information anyway, we should not expose color unless there is a
general case for it, not just as a solution for ill-behaved
applications.  The situation we face is very different from the Windows
cases in which we sniff/snoop existing APIs to get this information.

Regards,

Bill

> RGB format will be enough. An acessibility utility would present a number
> predefined color like "red", "light blue" and so on and/or the RGB triplet
> itself.
> 
> Best regards,
> Draghi
> 
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Bill Haneman" <Bill Haneman sun com>
> To: <gnome-accessibility-devel gnome org>; <Padraig Obriain sun com>
> Sent: Friday, January 04, 2002 3:07 PM
> Subject: Re: [g-a-devel]Support for Color in ATK
> 
> >
> > >Delivered-To: gnome-accessibility-devel gnome org
> > >From: "Padraig O'Briain" <Padraig Obriain sun com>
> > >To: gnome-accessibility-devel gnome org
> > >Subject: [g-a-devel]Support for Color in ATK
> > >X-BeenThere: gnome-accessibility-devel gnome org
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> > >Date: Fri, 4 Jan 2002 13:48:07 +0000 (GMT)
> > >
> > >Currently the only support for color in ATK is the text attributes
> > >ATK_TEXT_ATTR_FG_COLOR and ATK_TEXT_ATTR_BG_COLOR.
> > >
> > >Do we need to be able to support getting and setting of foreground and
> > >background colours for accessible objects which implement AtkComponent?
> >
> > My opinion is no, since the color information, to the extent that is is
> meaningful,
> > should be reflected in the STATE information (AtkState).  For well-behaved
> components
> > the colors should be obtained from the GTK theme on the basis of the
> widgets state (see
> > gtkstyle.c).  We probably should check to see that our AtkStates are
> currently
> > reflecting the widget state information.
> >
> > There may be a case to be made for obtaining colors in order for, for
> instance, a blind
> > or color-blind person to make sense of instructions like "press the green
> button...",
> > but again the real accessibility issue here is probably the use of color
> as a sole means
> > of conveying information.  In the absence of such accessibility "bugs" the
> exposure of
> > color information via ATK seems much less useful.  Anyway, what should we
> present to the
> > user, an RGB triplet?  It's  not clear how helpful that would be to the
> end user, or
> > what an assistive technology would do with the information.
> >
> > -Bill
> >
> > >Padraig
> > >
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> >
> > ------
> > Bill Haneman x19279
> > Gnome Accessibility / Batik SVG Toolkit
> > Sun Microsystems Ireland
> >
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