Re: [orca-list] Orca for Android?

[Nolan Darilek <nolan thewordnerd info>]

On 01/30/2010 08:14 PM, Bill Cox wrote:
> I see that accessibility on Android for phones is still not real.  In
> particular, it wont read the web browser, e-mail, or even the dialer.
>    

Not completely true. The dialer works just fine, though the other two 
are known issues. In the browser case, there's at least a partial 
workaround that I have yet to test--a copy of the stock Android browser 
with an embedded TTS API and JS hooking DOM events to provide speech. 
It's rather not-pretty, but at least it uses Webkit and modern code.

> Would it make sense for Google to adapt Orca for Android to make all
> these things accessible?  Is that hard?
>
>    
No and yes. The accessibility APIs are substantially different, with 
Android's being far more limited and simplified. Also, Android is 
Java-based, and even if something like Jython could be made to work on 
Android's modified bytecode, you'd then be running an interpreted app on 
the JVM--not exactly snappy. :)