Re: [orca-list] Possibly OT -- GUI development in Linux

[Stephen Clower <steve steve-audio net>]

Mario,

Thank you for the feedback. I had dismissed .Net as a possibility, but I may seriously consider this platform if Mono apps may soon be accessible under the Linux GUI. My .Net experience may not go to waste after all.

I'd appreciate any updates regardin Mono accessibility as it becomes available. I wonder if existing .Net programs would then work natively in Linux? Sound Forge 8 and 9 come to mind.

Regards,
Steve




Mario Lang wrote:

Stephen Clower <steve steve-audio net> writes:

  

Greetings,

I am interested in creating a cross-platform program that is
accessible in Windows, Linux, and possibly other operating
environments. The WX libraries appear to offer the cross-platform
capability while utilizing controls native to each operating
system. My questions to you more experienced GNOME developers are:

1.  Are the GTK components produced by WX Widgets accessible to
assistive technologies such as Orca? I recall a discussion on this
topic a couple of years back, and the prognosis for WX accessibility
wasn't good.
    

Some widgets work, some don't.  The text editor widget definitely
doesn't work on Linux.

  

2.  What approach did the orca developers take in creating the screen
reader's UI? With the freely available Windows tools, I have made
extensive use of a calculator to mathematically design screen
layouts. Needless to say, this approach is tedious at best.
    

The Orca developers use Glade to maintain the Orca GUI.
However, this job is done by sighted people (most of the orca
developers are ssighted IIRC).

  

3.  Are Win32 programs compiled against the Wine libraries accessible
to Orca?
    

No.

  

My plan is to create the program in either C++ or Python, depending on
which language will result in the least amount of changes across
operating systems. Feel free to point out another language/GUI toolkit
which I should investigate.
    

I've found two cross-platform accessible GUI frameworks that are
available right now.  Swing is accessible because the java-access-bridge
bridges accessibility info from Swing applications to
assistive technologies like Orca.  SWT (the Eclipse UI toolkit)
is cross-platform accessible because it uses native widgets
(just like Wx does, but SWT actually works).

There is one upcoming solution which is not readily available just yet
but which might get interesting in a few wekks, thats Mono accessibility
bindings (bridge) for WinForms applications to ATK.  So you will be
able to write a System.Windows.Forms based app in C# and have
it accessible on Linux and Windows.

I'm afraid I haven't found a cross-platform accessible GUI toolkit
for languages like C++ or Python, Java is the only option right now,
and C# will be a future option.  You might be able to use Jython
to program in Python but make use of existing Java classes.