Re: gtk accessibility on win32

[Marc Mulcahy <Marc Mulcahy Sun COM>]

Hi Allin,

Currently, GTK+ apps aren't accessible on Win32, because the GTKWidgets do 
not use standard Windows controls, and so screen readers can not identify 
them or make any sense of the information they contain.

Basically, I guess what you'd need would be an ATK to MSAA bridge.  You 
would need Gail installed, since it provides the ATK implementations for 
all the standard GTK+ widgets.  You wouldn't need libgail-gnome.

Creating an ATK to MSAA bridge wouldn't be trivial-- you'd have to create 
MSAA proxy objects that proxy for ATK objects.  Not insurmountable, but not 
trivial either.  The fact that MSAA only has one real interface would make 
your life a whole lot easier.  While ATK has several interfaces, AtkAction, 
AtkComponent, AtkImage, AtkText, etc.  MSAA has one interface which is most 
analogous to the basic AtkObject interface.

I guess the other issue is how complex is your app.  If it has some simple 
text controls and menus, then making it accessible on Win32 using the 
methods I described above is probably doable in a few weeks.  However, if 
you have any complex documents, such as HTML, or rich text, then the task 
would be nearly impossible, since MSAA doesn't define any interfaces for 
complex documents, and screen readers all sorta have their own notion of 
what MSAA should provide for complex documents such as web pages in IE and 
Adobe PDF files in Adobe Reader.

I don't mean to paint an overly bleak picture here-- just trying to provide 
some context and info about the current landscape.  Some more details about 
the complexity your app might be helpful.

If you decide that GTK+ is too complex to make accessible on Win32, there 
are a few other options worth considering for your GUI:

Java : Java Swing is accessible on both Linux and Windows (with JAWS)
The Eclipse Widget Toolkit- Is apparently somewhat accessible on both 
Windos and Linux, although I have no experience with it

HTH

Marc

At 09:24 PM 9/15/2004, Allin Cottrell wrote:
> Hello all,
>
> I need to make the win32 version of my gtk app accessible, in particular 
> for the visually impaired (vocalization of menus and so on).  After 
> googling some I have an initial notion of how to proceed, but I'd much 
> appreciate any comments from those who know more about the 
> technology.  Here are my current assumptions:
>
> 1. I need atk.  That's fine, Tor Lillqvist has given us an atk.dll.
>
> 2. Looks like I need GAIL, according to the logic set out at
>
> http://developer.gnome.org/projects/gap/guide/gad/
>
> So I need to port gail to win32, right?  But I guess I don't need 
> libgail-gnome, since it is gnome-specific and my app is "pure" GTK.
>
> 3. Then I need to make something like a port of atk-bridge, and I need to 
> find the part of atk-bridge where it actually talks to a speech 
> synthesizer (is it in fact atk-bridge that does that?) and add/substitute 
> a component that talks to, say, the Windows speech API (as implemented in 
> sapi.dll)
>
> (Of course, if I succeed in this I'll contribute the code to GTK/gnome, if 
> it's wanted.)
>
> --
> Allin Cottrell
> Department of Economics
> Wake Forest University, NC
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