Re: More info on ATK interfaces

[Eric Williams <ericwill redhat com>]

Hello,

On 09/26/2017 01:10 PM, Joanmarie Diggs wrote:
> There's no way to force Orca to do that from your end. Tell me why I
> should change Orca to do what you want? I might be persuaded, or you
> might be doing something less than ideal. Without more information, I
> don't know which it is.
>
> --joanie

I work on SWT which is based on GTK3 on the Linux side. We have 
implemented a custom GTK container called SwtFixed. It lets us do sizing 
manipulation and some other things, but most importantly every SWT 
widget (native or not) has one as its parent.

In SWT we mostly use native GTK widgets, but we also have emulated 
widgets. These are widgets that fill a niche which GTK cannot provide, 
and are manually drawn at the Java level onto an SwtFixed instance. From 
the GTK/ATK/OS perspective, these widgets only exist as SwtFixed containers.

The use case we have is that these emulated widgets can sometimes have 
children which are purely drawn. For example CTabFolder is a 
GtkNotebook-like widget, and each tab is a "child" of the parent 
CTabFolder. However these children do not have their own SwtFixed 
instances, they are just Java objects which are drawn onto the parent 
CTabFolder's SwtFixed instance.

I've created a custom ATK implementation for SwtFixed containers, which 
override the necessary interfaces and communicate with Java to get all 
the information to Orca. It would be useful if we could somehow connect 
these children of emulated widgets with that implementation.

Eric