Re: issues with X Window

[Charles McCathieNevile <charles w3 org>]

More or less, as far as I can tell. On the other hand, Mozilla is built under
gtk, and other applications are usng it (gnumeric I believe is a good
example).

As lupus said, a lot of the requirement is that the developers use good
design principles.

Charles McCN

On Sat, 21 Aug 1999, Whistler wrote:

  Doesn't this man though if you write speech for lets say the GTK tool kit
  that won't help when trying to use something like Word Perfect that is not
  compiled under the GTK tool kit?
  
  Ken /whistler
  
  On Sat, 21 Aug 1999, Paolo Molaro wrote:
  
  > 
  > There are several issues for an eyes-free access to the X Windows System
  > that need to be discussed:
  > 1) The low-level protocol
  > 2) The window manager
  > 3) The applications and the toolkits thay are bulit upon
  > 
  > 1) The low level protocol
  > The applications that run on an X Window System use the X protocol
  > to send to the server commands such as draw this line here, draw this 
  > string there etc.
  > This is useless from the visually impaired point of view because
  > there is no context or structure: these are low-level commands that
  > are impossibile to translate to speech or audio output.
  > This means that blind users will not be able to use all of
  > the applications that run in X.
  > 
  > 2) The window manager
  > Because the X server provides only for low-level access, there is 
  > the need for another program that handles the windows and their
  > decorations (the title bar, the close button, etc.).
  > The window manager handles also the focus changes between windows
  > and the position of the window on the desktop.
  > Different window managers use different focus policies: the policy
  > suited for blind access is usually called "Click to focus": this means
  > that to change focus from one window to another you have to click
  > with the mouse. This isn't so bad because you can use keyboard 
  > shortcuts to do the same. The important bit of information is that
  > the focus windows doesn't change if you accidentally move the mouse.
  > The problem with the other window manager functions (moving a
  > window, changing desktop, closing a window) is that the user needs
  > an audio feedback: this can be easily done by an external program
  > if the window manager supports the Gnome window manager hints.
  > Anyway, there are at least a couple of window managers in
  > development that use the Gtk+ library and so can be easily adapted to
  > work with GSpeech.
  > 
  > 3) The applications
  > The applications that work in an X Window enviroment can use the
  > low-level X protocol or a toolkit that provides high-level
  > interfaces. The former are not accessible for the blind.
  > There are many different toolkits for X Window.
  > The issues here is that there will be very few applications
  > developed with the blind user in mind, no matter what, so the
  > accessibility features must be built into the toolkit. This way
  > the applications don't need changes (they need to be well designed,
  > though, but that is required even for sighted people:-).
  > Currently, the toolkits that provide the features needed for
  > blind access are Xt/Motif and Gtk+.
  > 
  > These issues and the implementation of GSpeech will be presented
  > in a talk at the Atlanta Linux Showcase in October.
  > 
  > lupus
  > 
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--Charles McCathieNevile            mailto:charles w3 org
phone: +1 617 258 0992   http://www.w3.org/People/Charles
W3C Web Accessibility Initiative    http://www.w3.org/WAI
MIT/LCS  -  545 Technology sq., Cambridge MA, 02139,  USA