Re: Assorted gnopernicus questions

[Bill Haneman <bill haneman sun com>]

Hi Nolan!

It's great to hear that you are exploring gnopernicus, and the GNOME
desktop in general.  Your feedback is very helpful and it's encouraging
to us to know that there are folks out there starting to use our
accessibility stack.

I have an answer for one of your questions below:

>...While I can alt-tab into the
> player, I can't do this into the panel menu, so I'm trying to figure
> out how to click on those items.

Control-Alt-Tab cycles focus among the desktop and the panels (you might
have more than one panel).  There are other pieces of keyboard
navigation information that you might find helpful in the 

GNOME 2.2 Desktop Accessibility Guide:

 http://www.gnome.org/learn/access-guide/2.2/gnome-access-guide.html

Now, as for your next question:
> Also, as a completely random question, is there any reason that
> gnopernicus wouldn't work on OS X? I realize that it won't handle
> Quartz applications, but if I want to run a rootless X server from
> within OS X, would the fact that there isn't a root window affect
> gnopernicus in any way? Looks as if Fink provides ATK/Gail packages.

To be honest I haven't thought about the "rootless" issue for X.  More
than likely, a patch to at-spi's "at-spi-registryd" accessibility
registry might be required.  Also at-spi requires the XKB extension at
the moment, which may not be available for OS X (I am again not sure). 
But beyond a few issues like that which I think could be patched away, I
think gnopernicus should be able to work with GNOME apps on OS X.  I
don't think there are Fink packages for at-spi yet, but it's a project
worth doing.

Are there any OS X volunteers who'd like to look into this?

Again, thanks a million for your suggestions Nolan.

best regards,

Bill