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

[Bill Haneman <bill haneman sun com>]

Draghi Puterity wrote:
> 
> Hi All,
> 
> I just want to express my strong support for Peter's statement.
> 
> Maybe we can live a while without widget colors, but we certainly need text
> color. Although I increasingly tend to agree with Bill's point of view that
> color actually means state for widgets, I don't think this concept can
> successfully be extrapolated to a text inside a document, because there the
> "state" will be even more context dependent. For example the boss will mark
> a text paragraph in red and tell the employee "please review the red
> paragraph". Do we want a "boss marked text for review" state? Of course not,
> the state in this case is just a convention between the two.

Hi Draghi/Peter:

I agree with Peter as well regarding the desirability to expose
explicitly-set text color as text attributes.

No, of course, we don't want to do this via state.  My proposal was to
use text attributes to provide color information, not 'state' - my
comments regarding state were intended to be limited to the AtkComponent
interface and non-textual components.

However I think we would agree that the boss would be more correct in
using a "highlight" attribute if provided by the word processor, and
referring to the "highlighted paragraph"; good word processors provide
named styles for doing this kind of markup, in which case the text
attribute should be the style name rather than the color.  Of course if
the text color is changed directly via a 'color' attribute in the
application, then color is the attribute that should be exposed via the
text attribute API.

I think that it is desirable and feasible to expose text color as an
attribute wherever/whenever it has been explicitly set.

Regards,

Bill

> Draghi
> 
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Peter Korn" <korn sun com>
> To: "Bill Haneman" <Bill Haneman sun com>
> Cc: <mp baum de>; <Peter Korn sun com>; <Padraig Obriain sun com>;
> <gnome-accessibility-devel gnome org>
> Sent: Tuesday, January 08, 2002 8:01 PM
> Subject: Re: [g-a-devel]Support for Color in ATK
> 
> > Hi Bill,
> >
> > > In the case of text, we can if need be support color information via the
> > > existing attribute API (though we would prefer that the attribute
> information be
> > > more semantically meaningful) if we encounter cases where color
> information is
> > > not redundant with other types of attribution.  However as Peter points
> out, for
> > > other types of visuals we can't reliably get color information from
> "background"
> > > or "foreground" since most gnome UI elements (which are not already
> completely
> > > specified by the theme/state information) are multicolored,
> pixmap-based, or are
> > > icons of some sort.
> >
> > I think for text we should definitely support color information via the
> > Attribute API.  I expect that in too many cases color will be used to mean
> > things that aren't indicated in any other place (for example, I seriously
> > doubt that end-users writing documents will have read the GNOME
> Accessibility
> > guidelines and be taking care to use named styles associated with text
> > coloring; they'll just color the text and assume that anyone reading the
> > document will see the colors!).
> >
> >
> > Regards,
> >
> > Peter Korn
> > Sun Accessibility team
> > _______________________________________________
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> > Gnome-accessibility-devel gnome org
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