Re: Help API for GNOME 2.0

[Calum Benson <calum benson sun com>]

John Fleck wrote:
 
> Whichever solution we adopt, the xml/sgml rendering thingie will
> generate html, so for the final step the browser will have html to
> display, whether it's based on a static html file or dynamically
> generated from sgml/xml. Will that be sufficient to address the
> accessibility you're raising?

Well, I don't pretend to fully understand all the technologies
involved.  But at the moment I believe the most likely scenario is that
the only fully-accessible browsers available in the GNOME 2.0 timeframe
will be those that use gtk for their GUI, and GtkHTML2 to render the
pages.  

(If all the Nautilus custom widgets are made accessible in time,
Nautilus compiled with GtkHTML2 support instead of Mozilla would also
fall into this category, but so far I'm not sure that anyone has
explicitly volunteered to do that.)

Anyway, provided those browsers have access to the help files in a
format that the GtkHTML2 widget can display whenever necessary, I assume
there shouldn't be a problem.  But if this means the browsers themselves
have to spot the SGML files and convert them to HTML on demand, then we
do need to work with the maintainers to ensure there's at least one
otherwise-accessible browser for GNOME that does so, whether it's
Nautilus, Galeon, Encompass, or something else.

Cheeri,
Calum.

-- 
CALUM BENSON, Usability Engineer       Sun Microsystems Ireland
mailto:calum benson ireland sun com    Desktop Engineering Group
http://www.sun.ie                      +353 1 819 9771

Any opinions are personal and not necessarily those of Sun Microsystems