Re: GTK+ Modules and GDK

[Joel Becker <jlbec evilplan org>]

On Wed, Jun 19, 2002 at 06:11:57PM +0100, Bill Haneman wrote:
> In order to drive something like a braille display from GTK+, one needs
> an API like ATK and an assistive technology like a screenreader which
> listens to AT-SPI events (bridged from ATK) and queries the AT-SPI API
> (again, bridged to ATK) in order to present 1-D textual information to
> the user in response to changes in the GUI.  In response to button press
> events and other events from the braille display (which doubles as a
> sort or auxilliary input device), the assistive technology can call ATK
> API via the AT-SPI to do things like activate menu items and make
> queries about text attributes, etc.
> 
> That's why things like keyboard navigation and focus tracking 'are so
> important to accessibility.  A screenreader monitors the GUI events and
> queries the API so that it can digest the results into a 'textable' form
> and stream it, interactively, to a 1D text device.

	Hmm, so GTK+ draws to the screen and ATK listens for the events
that fire and interprets those events for the braille screen?  Is that
the gist of it (never mind how I've botched the specifics ;-)?  If you
don't initialize a display, what does GTK+/GDK draw to?  Is GDK peppered
with "if (!have_display) return;" for all of its drawing functions?  I
would think it would have to be if GTK+ was to run in full without a
display.
	I understand what you are doing above.  I guess when I think
about it I'd have done a null-screen GDK backend.  You'd "connect" to a
"display" that does nothing, while the GTK+ events fire fine and ATK can
proxy them to the right bits.  I'm sure you've done something better
(this is just my stream of thought here), but I'm curious what :-)
	Anyway, my original comment was not that we shouldn't support
it.  Rather, I was commenting on Owen's proposed solutions, and I
happened to mention that I couldn't think of a situation.  Now I can.

Joel


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