Re: [g-a-devel] Accessible cross-platform toolkit?

[Aaron Leventhal <aaronlev moonset net>]

I'm surprised to hear these things about XUL.

Being one of the Firefox developers who made XUL accessible, I can 
definitely say that making XUL accessible was always very high priority. 
Which bugs are reported but getting ignored?

Seriously, I want to know so we can work on them. Please email a list of 
bugs to me.

XUL is 10 years old now, and a ton of work went into making it 
accessible. FWIW we have the XUL accessibility docs here: 
http://developer.mozilla.org/en/Accessible_XUL_Authoring_Guidelines

- Aaron

Milan Zamazal wrote:
> Having written one XUL application targeted specifically on blind users,
> I wouldn't recommend XUL for writing accessible applications unless one
> can't find anything better.  Although XUL is basically accessible, there
> are minor annoyances which may make doing some things difficult to
> impossible.
>
> The very first problem is that there is little real interest of
> supporting XUL in the accessibility infrastructure.  Firefox and Orca
> developers naturally focus on HTML accessibility and XUL is not such a
> high priority area for them.  Current JAWS support for XUL in Firefox 3
> is poor, making some things inaccessible (NVDA is better in this area).
>
> Additionally, XUL is not that great development environment.  JavaScript
> is handy for smaller tasks, but Java is IMHO much more suitable for
> larger applications.  XUL doesn't handle widget tree switching very
> well, apparently some things can't be managed right after they are
> created thus making certain actions tricky and complicated.  Developer
> documentation is far from perfect (e.g. in comparison with Java
> documentation).  As for accessibility related items, there are sometimes
> problems with keyboard navigation, focus handling is still somewhat
> mystery to me, there is no Firefox and/or screen reader support for some
> important concepts like table navigation, reporting statusbar changes or
> character reading.  Overall our XUL application works, but not
> perfectly, it's far from normally usable with JAWS and I was forced to
> use some ugly tricks, not speaking about time spent on experiments,
> googling and reporting.
>
> I agree that wxWindows is not really accessible.  We've rejected it very
> soon for that reason.  I've got no experience with Java accessibility so
> I can't compare it with XUL.  One promising area, depending on the kind
> of application, may be HTML+ARIA.  There are some widget toolkits based
> on this, it's backed up by a W3C standard and it is likely to be well
> supported at least in Firefox and Orca (better than XUL is).  I'm just
> not sure about smooth interaction of HTML and JavaScript in comparison
> to XUL, namely about global key bindings and global focus handling, I
> have still to investigate how those things work.  Finally, there is Qt.
> It's accessible on Windows and it should be accessible on Linux but
> AFAIK it doesn't work with Orca at all.
>
> Regards,
>
> Milan Zamazal
>
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