Re: gtk accessibility on win32

[Allin Cottrell <cottrell wfu edu>]

On Wed, 15 Sep 2004, Marc Mulcahy wrote:

> Currently, GTK+ apps aren't accessible on Win32, because the 
> GTKWidgets do not use standard Windows controls, and so screen 
> readers can not identify them or make any sense of the information 
> they contain.

OK, thanks, that's what I was guessing.

> Basically, I guess what you'd need would be an ATK to MSAA bridge. 
> You would need Gail installed, since it provides the ATK 
> implementations for all the standard GTK+ widgets.  You wouldn't 
> need libgail-gnome.

Sounds good so far.

> Creating an ATK to MSAA bridge wouldn't be trivial-- you'd have to 
> create MSAA proxy objects that proxy for ATK objects.  Not 
> insurmountable, but not trivial either.

Thank you for the realistic appraisal.  I'll have to do a little more 
investigating to see whether this looks doable within my time 
constraints.

> I guess the other issue is how complex is your app.  If it has some 
> simple text controls and menus, then making it accessible on Win32 
> using the methods I described above is probably doable in a few 
> weeks.

The most important thing for me is getting simple textual menu items 
read, so that a visually impaired user can make menu selections.  So 
this sounds quite hopeful.

I already have some "custom" code that bypasses the whole ATK arena, 
which enables a user to press 'a' for audio over certain kinds of 
output windows and get a nice audio rendition of the content (using 
either the Windows Speech API or Flite under linux).  And also (this 
is a data analysis program) a mechanism for rendering graphs in audio 
by generating MIDI files.

Allin Cottrell