[g-a-devel] (no subject)

[steve fullmeasure co uk]

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From: "Steve Lee" <steve fullmeasure co uk>
Bounce-To: "Steve Lee" <steve fullmeasure co uk>
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CC: gnome-accessibility-devel gnome org, gnome-accessibility-list gnome org
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Sorry for repeats but the temporary webmail client I used seems to barf
on some characters.

On 8/28/2007, "Peter Korn" <Peter Korn Sun COM> wrote:

>to highlight regions of the screen, regions of a window, in
>order to allow a user who can only press a single button/switch to
>successively narrow down which part of the UI they want to interact
>with.
[snip]
>to better highlight the text caret or focused
>control (see ZoomText 8 and 9 on Windows for some nice examples of
>this).

I'm *very* interested in this. In win32 you can draw on the screen
bitmap but in distributed X such a system service is required. I've not
yet investigated this area in earnest but it definitely be an important
part of my work on Jambu alternative input. It is also going to be
highly useful for the many users who use reading support as you say. It
effectively allows many sources to be treated as an e-book with
high-lighting and if you add TTS to read the highlighted word is even
more effective.

People may want a combination of switch, mag, tts and highlighting so
there's value in shared services or getting ATs to interact in useful
ways.

My thoughts so far are that in the absence of such a service as is being
described the options are:

1) select UI item via AT/SPI - that's application specific and needs
AT/SPI support in the application
2) Composite or Beryl etc- not sure how general that is - currently
needs to be enabled and enough processing power.
3) window manager extension - very limited functionality
4) anything else?

So a general system/desktop service that can be controlled by ATs appears
the most flexible and applicable solution. The magnifier is in the right
arena, perhaps renamed to indicated more general display enhancement
services?

Steve Lee
fullmeasure.co.uk