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

["Draghi Puterity" <mp baum de>]

Hi Peter,

........

> >
> > MP: So there is no "legal" GTK API to set the color of a standard widget
> > different from the prefered fore/back colors?
>
> That word "legal" is tricky, and has caused much churn in the Windows (and
> Macintosh) accessibility worlds in the past.

MP: Just for fun: Don Box (a COM guru) said once: "Why it is something
legal? Because it works!" ;-)

In the Unix (and especially X)
> world, you can't do anything without using API to do so.  The hardware
(and
> video display) is isolated from application code.  So, since the
programmer is
> using API calls to render color to a widget, it's "legal" right?  What it
> clearly is, is counter to guidelines (be it generally GNOME programming
> guidelines, user-interface guidelines, accessibility guidelines,
whatever).
>
> A key design goal for us API designers is to make following the guidelines
> (whichever they are) as easy for developers to do as possible.  And of
course,
> many cats are out of many bags at this point (to do injustice to an
> American/English saying) - we have to live with API conventions from GNOME
1.x
> days.
>
> So, we cannot prevent a programmer from rendering a widget with direct
calls
> to render specific things in specific colors; nor do we want to go down
the
> path of patching various rendering calls in order to figure out what's
going
> on (repeat five times: "we don't want to need an Off-Screen Model").
>
>
> So, we have to decide if the less-than-complete foreground/background
color
> info gives us enough of what we need for the cases above where Role/State
> aren't sufficient; or whether we should instead focus our efforts on
getting
> developers to follow Role/State (and other) accessibility guidelines.
>
> Perhaps in this instance the latter investment is the right one for now...
>

MP: Actually I was not thinking of exotic X or GDK calls, but to more
"harmless" things like gtk_widget_set_colormap which is a GTK API. So we
need to make the app programers aware that they are only allowed to use a
subset of the GTK in order to get an accessible application.

Draghi