Re: gtk accessibility on win32



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





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