GUIs (was Re: A comment on Slashdot)

[Matthew Campbell]

Kirk Wood writes:
 > In short, the only
 > way to program with known accessibility is to limit oneself to the M$
 > Foundation Library. But this negates the whole point of C++. A developer
 > is supposed to be able to create a new control. Should it then rest on him
 > to modify the OS so that speech works?

I thought the whole point of MSAA was that applications could define
their own controls and use the MSAA API to make them accessible by
providing information about them to accessibility aids like screen
readers.  MS has implemented MSAA in Internet Explorer, and to some
degree in Office as well.  Before MSAA was introduced, screen readers
could provide access to applicatiosn that used the standard Windows
controls, but not necessarily to applications that had their own
custom controls.  I thought MSAA was designed to solve that problem.

But anyway, this is a Linux mailing list, so I'd like to present a few
ideas about how access to GUI's under Linux could be achieved.  I
think the main problem in achieving access to Linux GUI's is that
there are many GUI toolkits, each having its own set of widgets
controls.  I'm aware that there's a project called GSpeech which is
trying to add speech to the GTK toolkit, which is used by the GNOME
desktop.  It's a GTK module that's automatically loaded into any
application which uses GTK.  It has its own commands for reading
things on the screen, and it currently supports the Festival software
synthesizer.  I'm glad the author of GSpeech is putting the time and
effort into this area, but I don't think he's using the right
approach.  GSpeech only provides access to GTK and GNOME, and though
GHONE may be your primary desktop, you're bound to run an application
sometime that doesn't use GTK as its toolkit.  I suppose that every
toolkit and window manager could be speech-enabled in a similar way,
but then you'd have to use different screen review commands for each
toolkit, and keep track of which one is used by each application you
run.

I think a better approach is to have a screen reader which runs
outside of all your applications, and then modify or extend the GUI
toolkits so that they expose information about the GUI's to the screen
reader in a consistent way.  And this screen reader should be able to
at least read the text in any application window, regardless of what
GUI toolkit is being used, so that you have some level of access to
all X applications.

-- 
Matt Campbell <mattcamp at crosswinds.net>
Web site:  http://www.crosswinds.net/~mattcamp/
ICQ #:  33005941