Re: Fwd: windows gaim screen reader

[Bill Haneman <Bill Haneman Sun COM>]

> Tor, any ideas?
>
> Note: forwarded message attached.
> ...
Windows screenreader technologies have historically been very nonportable
and rather application-specific.  They also rely on Win32 API and, in a 
few cases,
on the 'MSAA' accessibility API which is implemented by many stock Windows
GUI components for a couple of years now.  It would be much more 
feasible to port
GNOME accessibility technologies to Windows (see below).

The new MS applications APIs and toolkits don't include MSAA, they have 
been
significantly reengineered, and the new accessibility support is 
provided by something
which IIRC is called 'GUI Automation' APIs.  So the future of MSAA is 
uncertain at best.

It has been suggested the MSAA is being deprecated in part because it
wasn't really a rich enough API to support full-featured accessibility 
anyway - Windows
screenreaders ended up having to listen to lots of Win32 "private" 
and/or semi-documented
API in addition to MSAA. 

It's possible that gtk+'s windows implementation could include some sort of
atk-to-windows bridge in the future, but it's not clear that the Win 
apis are conducive to that. 
On the other hand, ATK itself has been ported to Windows for some time, 
and AFAIK the
additional underlying technologies for at-spi could be ported as well.  
This would allow
the GNOME assistive technologies, including the gnopernicus screen 
reader, to work
under win-gtk.

> Herman,
>
> Hello, I'm not sure what you awesome gaim guys can do about this, but I
> thought I'd send it your way anyway...
>
> As I am always trying to get windows users to switch to gaim (since it
> became available to them), I posted on a forum at Michigan State, to
> someone with issues with "DeadAIM"...In a nutshell, he is blind and cannot
> use gaim, since his screen reader program won't work with aim...is there
> something you guys could do?  I'm no programmer. =(
>
> here is the details of his posting:
>
> "Just tryed it. With out getting technical it isn't going to work for me
> at all. As you can tell by my user name I'm totally blind. I use a program
> called jaws for windows that allows me to use windows, by feedback in
> synthetic speach. For example in aim the messeges are automaticly spoken
> as they come in. Gaim doesn't work with jaws, it is because gtk underlyes
> it, not standard windows controls. In dead aim no new windowing system is
> implemented. I tryed gaim downloaded it, installed it, but the screen
> simply won't speak anything, I couldn't even log in."
>
> He responded again with this:
>
> "I know xwindows works under windows with my screen reader since the
> windows api underlyes it, but the windows api doesn't underly gtk in the
> same way. An alternative would be either add in MSAA support, I know
> mozilla did this to some extent, or B rewrite gtk to use the windows API.
> Any cs or ce majors who want to do this for a senior project?"
>  
I am not aware of any xwindows products/servers for windows which work with
MSAA or existing Windows screenreaders.

I would think that porting gtk-win to use the windows toolkit would be 
much bigger than a
senior project, and even then it is doubtful whether the result would 
work with JAWS for
Windows.

> all in all, thanks for taking the time to read this.
>
> long live gaim!
>
> -Mark Tarq
>
>