Re: Porting Dasher to Gnome accessibility framework

[Michael Meeks <michael ximian com>]

Hi Matthew,

On Wed, 2003-01-22 at 05:36, Matthew Garrett wrote:
> I'm working on the Dasher project (http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk).

	Great :-)

> We've recently made our 3.0 release, which marks the point where we're
> developing it fairly seriously. There's currently a GTK interface, but
> we're looking at integrating things more usefully into Gnome. There's a
> few questions, though:
>
> 1) In its current form, Dasher doesn't provide anything in the way of
> direct interface with applications. Modifying it to enter text into the
> selected window/textbox is pretty easy. Would it be worth it to try to
> integrate more closely, in a similar way to GOK? The model really isn't
> optimised for selecting menu options or similar activities, though there's
> no real reason why this couldn't be kludged on in some fashion.

	Well - I suppose this may involve changing the way how dasher works -
so far I havn't had a chance to look at it in any detail unfortunately.
However, if you can think of a use for detailed semantic information,
such as what word position in a paragraph / sentence you are to inform
that dictionary / matching search, perhaps that could help ? Perhaps to
enable menu / toolbar options as you say, I'm sure some interesting ways
of traversing dialogs / widgets could be constructed - but possibly
that's too far out.

> 2) The platform independent core is written in C++ - at the moment, so is
> the platform dependent interface code. We're using gtkmm for bindings.
> Porting with gnomemm is presumably the easiest option for us, but in a
> hypothetical idyllic future world where Gnome ships with various
> accessibility applications would this be an acceptable dependency?

	Sounds ok to me; the more interesting apps that use the C++ the
bindings the better I think - since then they're more likely to be taken
seriously and shipped widely.

> I'll be at FOSDEM in Brussels next month, so if there's anyone involved in
> accessibilty work going it'd be good to catch up.

	I'll be there; I look forward to meeting you [ I'm also working nearby
in Newmarket if you need any more detailed / hands-on assistance / pint
drinking skills ;-] Sorry for not getting back sooner, was on holiday.

	Regards,

		Michael.

-- 
 mmeeks gnu org  <><, Pseudo Engineer, itinerant idiot