Re: [g-a-devel]Source of mouse:button events

[gnome-accessibility-devel bernard-hugueney org]

Hi Bill, thank you for all your help !

Le Vendredi 26 Septembre 2003 09:14, Bill Haneman a écrit :
> Hi Bernard:
>
> Toolkit-specific events are intentionally undocumented, as we don't
> want to encourage their widespread use.

I understand.

>
> I still do not understand the problem you are trying to solve; can
> you give more context?  In the context of assistive technologies it
> is not clear what you are doing.  If you are trying to build some
> sort of test or automation tool then there are a number of factors
> to consider.  As I said, you should be receiving (and listening
> for) state changes to widgets in response to user actions such as
> mouse button clicks or even mouse enter and exit events, not the
> device events themselves.  The same is true for keyboard events;
> except for the case of command keys for your application, it's
> often better to monitor text-changed events and other widget state
> changes than monitor keyboard events directly.  Key echo can be
> another exception in some situations, but it depends on user
> preference and the exact problem your application is trying to
> solve.
>

I want to study user-GUI interactions. For that purpose, I need to log 
them. I was not satified with the two most common approaches:
1) application-level logging : requires to patch the apps to log the 
events.
2) system-level (Xserver) logging : too low-level, no application 
semantics.

That's why I want to get the best of both worlds with a 
toolkit-oriented approach. At-spi seemed perfect for it. I thought I 
could easely log that, for example, Button with text "OK" child of 
widget labelled "Do you want to quit" child of application named 
"OpenOffice.org 1.1.0".
I still think I can have this kind of information, but not as easely 
as I hoped for.

User-GUI interactions goes both ways. I understand that assistive 
technology is more interested in the GUI->user way. I still think I 
can nevertheless also use it to get user->GUI informations.
I'm not only interested by the application's response (text inserted), 
but also by the user action that triggered it (mouse middle click?, 
Ctrl-V?, normal keyboard input?)

> Please try to avoid the use of toolkit-specific events; I do not
> see the relevance to your charset issue, which is a bug.  That bug

Well, as a workaround for the bug, which seems to occur only with 
OO.org, I was about to translate the strings myself when I get them 
from OO.org toolkit. I was the use OO.org toolkit specific events to 
know when I have to translate the strings.

> is currently being investigated; we are currently explaining the
> issue to StarOffice/OpenOffice engineering.

Thanks alot for  that. As I wasn't sure it was a bug or some 
misunderstanding of mine, I resolved to workaround the behavior 
instead of holding my breath :-)

Thanks a lot for your help.

Bernard