Re: 2.6 proposed module: dasher

[Matthew Garrett <mjg59-gap srcf ucam org>]

On Mon, Jan 12, 2004 at 11:16:21AM -0800, Peter Korn wrote:

> The GNOME integration may well be strong enough by the time 2.6 ships, but 
> I think there are still some significant issues to work out to make that 
> more useful.  As a standalone application for entering text via an 
> alternate interface for people with severe physical disabilities, it is 
> *very* interesting and the performance numbers from their studies are quite 
> remarkable.  As an assistive technology that allows a someone with a severe 
> physical disability to completely control their desktop, I think it has a 
> good ways to go.

We targetted menus firstly since they lend themselves best to a
tree-like representation. Adding the other widgets is in itself fairly
trivial (we just build a similar tree with the other widgets in it), but
find a reasonable way to present that to the user may be harder - a menu
tree is obviously a tree, but toolbars get arranged a little more, uh,
"interestingly" :) If it's felt that it would be useful, then I ought to
be able to code this up for tomorrow.

Regarding documentation - the combination of the manpage and the Windows 
help docs ought to be enough (ie, the text /exists/, it just needs to be 
cut and pasted into a file of the appropriate format), and the only 
reason it hasn't happened is that I know absolutely nothing about 
Docbook :) I'll sort this out ASAP.

(Actually, work's been held up a bit since my 2.5 setup seems to cause 
Dasher to segfault in spi_init(). I'm not sure what's going on in there 
yet)
-- 
Matthew Garrett | mjg59 srcf ucam org