Re: [Telepathy] Pictogram support (Montreal Summit)

[meg ford <meg387 gmail com>]

Hi,

Thanks for taking the time to respond, Guillaume.

> > Thinking in people with language and communication disorders (i.e.
> > people not able to read/write due to cognitive/mental disorders), it
> > would be interesting to have a IM client able to compose, send and
> > display messages made up pictograms + text.

Out of curiosity (I know basically nothing about accessibility) isn't
audio/video chat a good solution for those users?

Sometimes it is a good option, but this type of program is also commonly recommended for people with, for example, Cerebral Palsy.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cerebral_palsy  Such users cannot always speak.

> > So, messages would look like this:
> >
> > http://1.bp.blogspot.com/___h4z60kN9fAk/TBnOIM61kUI/__AAAAAAAAAQ8/TM0fBXcTvyA/s1600/__cumplea%C3%B1os.png

Doesn't work. :\

> And here Meg's answer:
>
> >   I spoke to one of the developers of Telepathy about this, and here is
> > what he said:
> >
> > Currently Telepathy does not support this type of feature. For example,
> > users cannot send emoticons that they have drawn themselves. Therefore,
> > you would need to write a library for this. If you are willing to write
> > a library, they would be happy to have this feature.

So yeah, at the moment Telepathy/Empathy doesn't support user-define
emoticons ( https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=25686 ). This
shouldn't be implemented as a library but part of Telepathy directly. So
you should:
- Have an API in the Telepathy specification
- Implement it in at least one connection manager, ideally Gabble, our
XMPP backend.
- Make use of this API in your app.

Actually, if you want to just send a a bunch of images, the Messages
( http://telepathy.freedesktop.org/spec/Channel_Interface_Messages.html
) API could  be enough. But AFAIK Gabble doesn't support sending non
text messages atm so you should still implement this.

> > Secondly, they recommend that you write a seperate app for this feature,
> > but use the Empathy contact list. They recommend that the feature be
> > accessed through the accessibility menu.

Telepathy is a pretty flexible framework so you could for example use
your specific app for text chat but still use the other part of Empathy.

> - Do (most commonly used) supported protocols allow for sending
> arbitrary images along with text? Otherwise it would be pointless to try
> to write a library for this.

MSN certainly does; but telepathy-butterfly (our MSN backend) is kinda
dead and we love freedom so XMPP would be our first choice. According to
the bug I linked above Pidgin implements this using XEP-0231
( http://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0231.html ) so that should be doable.
But best to check with a XMPP expert if that's the best way to do it.

Again, thanks for explaining all of this. I appreciate your time.

Meg Ford