Re: Gnopernicus and scripting applications

[Luke Yelavich <themuso themuso com>]

Hi Luca
On Thu, Sep 16, 2004 at 10:42:04PM EST, Luca Davanzo wrote:
> Hi all,
> I dont know orca, but basically what i understood is that it is quite a
> "testbed application" allows one to
> script  an application (using python i think? in order to enhance its
> accessibility;

Python is the language used to write scripts for applications to add extra
functionality to orca to allow better access to an application.

>  I think that  the ability to script an application should be
> introduced as soon as possible in gnopernicus too.

I disagree here. The way I see things, Gnopernicus is currently the one program that does most things, I.E speech, braille and magnification. Orca is still only a test application, but since it is so flexible due to the use of Python, it is able to be taken in a different direction. I personally see Orca being the JAWS/Window-Eyes, and Gnopernicus being the ZoomText.

> I think that relying exclusively on application writers to follows  all the
> accessibility rules to make their application accessibile is quite  an
> irrealistic

I don't think it is following accessibility rules. Application authors can still write applications, and if they use GTK+ widgets the application is already accessible. However, if they use custom widgets and pixmaps, it is trivial to use ATK calls I think to make these widgets accessible.

<Snip>
> Jaws has a very powerful scripting language that allows even power users
> (not necessarily programmers) to write powerful scripts/macro, it allows to
> reclassify
> unknown UI controls,  and so does windows eyes.
> 
> I think  that this  ability (a scripting language) is  crucial if  we want
> to have access to a reasonable number of applications.

Again, I think Orca will be the application to do this, for a few reasons.
* Screen magnification doesn't need scripting as such, as magnification is not using accessibility information from GTK widgets AFAIK.
* Keyboard controls in Gnopernicus are customizable, but as far as I can see, there is no real way of storing a preset definition of controls, for say desktop and laptop. There is no support for this in Orca yet, but adding such support would be quite trivial.
* It would be possible to introduce such things as verbocity, context-sensitive help, and keyboard command help, etc into Orca to make it more user-friendly for former JAWS/Window-Eyes users.

There are probably many more, but I can't think of them right now.

A few months back, I was actually reading through the py-gtk documentation. I didn't get far due to other commitments, but I have started planning a basic GUI, and preferences dialog system for keyboard shortcuts and all. The nice thing about the way Orca has been designed, is that one doesn't have to have any window or icon on the screen for it at all if they don't wish, which means less clutter and accidental shut-down of their screen reader.

I don't think Gnopernicus' developers meant to introduce scripting support. If they did, we would have seen it a while back. This is why Mark created Orca I think, to provide a sollution to this very issue.

Luke