GNOME.org
 

[orca-list] at-spi and toolkits (was Re: nvda under the Wine)

Hi
Wouldn't the widget toolkit in question have to be able to communicate with at-spi first before a widget registry would work? If EFLTK, for example, doesn't expose anything to at-spi in the first place, how is at-spi supposed to see what isn't there? The second issue is that a lot of times, even in GUI toolkits that do mostly work with at-spi, you have container controls that don't. Look at WX for a good example of this, most WX container controls for lists just say "panel" as far as at-spi and Orca are concerned... and WX bridges to GTK. This isn't something the application developer can really fix without retooling part of WX in the first place. So, in such cases, we might be able to label these "panels" but we still wouldn't be able to see inside them. It's similar to the situation in Windows where by you can tell a screen reader to treat an unknown control as a certain type. Sometimes it works but, if you tell the screen reader this is a list box, the control has to at least partially act like a list box or you still won't get any meaningful feedback out of the effort. The screen reader will say "list box" instead of "unknown," but you still won't be able to read the items in it if they aren't exposed. This applies equally well to most accessibility architectures be they MSAA, at-spi, Apple Accessibility, etc. 


On 03/31/2011 06:40 AM, Alex Midence wrote:

Looks like Luke's approach would be the best then.  Some sort of way
for msaa to talk to at-spi through Wine.

I've lately been thinking that it would be a nice thing for some
university or other to take up at-spi as a project.  It would be nice
if at-spi could be given some sort of "Widget registry" utility that
would run whenever widgets in an unknown toolkit like ETK, QT, FTK
ETC. appeared.  It would give the user a chance to "label" or
"classify" them according to known widget categories or types.  This
information would then be stored somewhere and solutions like Orca
could then make use of it so that the ownus is no longer so much on
the developers of different software to have to worry about making
their solutions accessible and more so on people interested more
directly in that accessibility.  Doing things the way they are done
right now is realy hit or miss.  YOu have to hope a developer is
willing to work with you and has time to do it or you are out of luck.
  Your bug report turns into an "enhancement" and, it never gets
attended to.  Look at AbiWord.  I think if something along the lines
of a Widget Registry could be implemented, it would open up all
desktop environments to Orca and, by extension, Orca users.  It would
be nice if we could use comercial stuff like CDE, for instance which
is standard on Unix installations.  This would come closer to
empowering blind people to have the same benefit a sighted person has:

Walk up to any machine, turn it on, be taught its use and, within
hours or, in some cases minutes if the interface is close enough to
something familiar, be productive in accomplishing a task.

Anyway, I'll stop preaching to the choir.  =)  My apologies for a
slightly off topic ramble.

Alex M
On 3/31/11, Jacob Schmude<j schmude gmail com>  wrote:

Hi
Currently, no Windows screen reader will work under wine because of two
major problems. The first problem, in a nutshell, is that Wine has
almost none of the internal MSAA or UIA hooks that they need in order to
work. Also, where the proprietary screen readers are concerned, Wine has
no facility for hooking up drivers which rules out the display driver
approach used by most of them. The second issue, though less serious, is
that Wine does not emulate a full Windows environment (i.e. none of the
Windows GUI is emulated). Wine will run a single application in a
partially-emulated Windows environment. So, saying "wine nvda.exe" will
run wine with nvda, but realize that nvda is considered the application
which Wine is to run. There's no start menu, no desktop, nor any of that
so, even if NVDA or another screen reader were to work, you'd have no
way to launch another application within that environment where the
screen reader is running.
What would be neat is if Wine could bridge standard MSAA and UIA hooks
to at-spi somehow. It could probably be done, but it wouldn't be a quick
or easy thing to do. The end result would be that Windows applications
in Wine would communicate enough to run with Orca, but I'm not sure if
everything could be emulated correctly since at-spi and MSAA/UIA are
different in their approaches.
As for Linux being able to do everything that Windows can... I wish. I
really wish it could, and we're getting there. In fact, for most people
who don't require accessibility, we're already there. Unfortunately
however, some apps are either not available or written in QT (i.e.
Skype) and we either can't use them or can only do so half way. We're
close, but we're not quite there yet as far as accessibility goes.

On 03/30/2011 07:17 PM, Kyle wrote:

I'm currently not able to get NVDA speaking using Wine. It complains
about ALSA, Pulse and a few other things, but it does play the startup
and shutdown sounds, so ALSA and Pulse don't seem to be the real
problem. I have the portable version of NVDA in $HOME/nvda. Running

cd nvda
wine nvda.exe

plays the startup sound followed immediately by the shutdown sound.
Several errors about alsa, Pulse and a dll called winemp3.acm, which I
believe is just an mp3 codec, and shouldn't be required to start NVDA
speech, appear in the terminal, and the program dies. It looks as though
fixes are needed in Wine somewhere before NVDA can be made to speak.
~Kyle
_______________________________________________
orca-list mailing list
orca-list gnome org
http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/orca-list
Visit http://live.gnome.org/Orca for more information on Orca.
The manual is at
http://library.gnome.org/users/gnome-access-guide/nightly/ats-2.html
The FAQ is at http://live.gnome.org/Orca/FrequentlyAskedQuestions
Netiquette Guidelines are at
http://live.gnome.org/Orca/FrequentlyAskedQuestions/NetiquetteGuidelines
Log bugs and feature requests at http://bugzilla.gnome.org
Find out how to help at http://live.gnome.org/Orca/HowCanIHelp

_______________________________________________
orca-list mailing list
orca-list gnome org
http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/orca-list
Visit http://live.gnome.org/Orca for more information on Orca.
The manual is at
http://library.gnome.org/users/gnome-access-guide/nightly/ats-2.html
The FAQ is at http://live.gnome.org/Orca/FrequentlyAskedQuestions
Netiquette Guidelines are at
http://live.gnome.org/Orca/FrequentlyAskedQuestions/NetiquetteGuidelines
Log bugs and feature requests at http://bugzilla.gnome.org
Find out how to help at http://live.gnome.org/Orca/HowCanIHelp
[Date Prev][Date Next]   [Thread Prev][Thread Next]   [Thread Index] [Date Index] [Author Index]