[brailleblaster] Re: SWT Browser Contrl

Hello,
Firstly I would say this is an interesting and imaginative idea. It probably reinforces what I was saying about needing requirements, when you have requirements people can be creative about how to solve the problem and provide what is needed.
Now to the accessibility issue. As far as I know there should not be any accessibility issue in using the SWT browser control, it uses the native rendering engines from the appropriate platform. It may, and I stress this is only may, need a script in some screen readers to just encourage them to acknowledge what the control is but I would imagine that would be trivial if even needed.
The bit which most concerns me is the accessibility of elements BrailleBlaster would be creating in HTML. The bit of most concern is the edit area, we know how bad some wikis/forums can be for accessibility when they have a wysiwyg edit control. Could any one suggest some which are good for accessibility and then these could be explored with screen readers on the various platforms. I know performance can be a significant issue on Linux with orca when browsing web pages. 

Michael Whapples
On 02/02/11 17:35, John J. Boyer wrote:

Thanks. This does help and is very interesting. Maybe we can get a
desktop application and a Web application at the same time. I'm not
changing course, but this is a possibility worth looking at. One problem
is that we might not know about accessibility until we tried it.

John

On Wed, Feb 02, 2011 at 09:13:09AM -0800, Chris von See wrote:

Up front: I'm not necessarily advocating use of the SWT browser
control as a UI - it was more of a response to some of the concerns
expressed about the accessibility of SWT.  I've been curious about the
accessibility of the SWT browser control for my own purposes - Freedom
Scientific won't say that they support it, and I haven't talked to the
WindowEyes folks yet - so this seemed like a good opportunity to both
throw out a possibly viable option and get some info myself.

Having said that, if you chose to use the SWT browser control you
would in essence be writing a web-based braille application, most
likely using an embedded servlet container such as Jetty.  What you
end up with may well be something similar to Google Docs; similar
approaches are used in numerous applications, but whether it works for
BrailleBlaster would depend on the functionality you want to
implement.  Our TAMC application uses an embedded Jetty container to
render a HTML UI, but it uses a regular browser window (whatever the
user's default browser is) and not the SWT browser window.  The system
default browser can be launched using the Desktop.browse() or
Desktop.open() methods in JDK 1.6 and later.

Here's a half-formed possible approach: Much of the back-end
functionality of BrailleBlaster (file load/save, search/replace,
translation, etc.) would be implemented much as it is envisioned now,
except that the user interface would be implemented using some
combination of HTML, JavaScript, Java servlets and/or other
technologies (UI builders such as Java Server Faces or Freemarker, and/
or a web framework such as Apache Struts, Apache Wicket or even
Spring, for example).  Editing would be done in an HTML text control
or in an ActiveX text editor (not sure about accessibility in this
case, but there are lots of options out there), with buttons,
checkboxes, and other controls implemented using HTML.  It's possible
to call Java from JavaScript inside the SWT browser control, so if you
need an immediate reaction to the changing of control state you should
be able to do it with Java if JavaScript isn't enough.  For multiple
views you would probably open multiple SWT shells, each with its own
browser control.

There are lots of code snippets for the browser control at
http://www.eclipse.org/swt/snippets/#browser , and the SWT example set
includes a BrowserExample application which  can be downloaded from
http://help.eclipse.org/helios/index.jsp?topic=/org.eclipse.platform.doc.isv/reference/api/org/eclipse/swt/browser/package-summary.html

Hope this helps...


Cheers
Chris

On Feb 2, 2011, at 3:22 AM, John J. Boyer wrote:


Chris von See, could you elaborate on your idea of making the
framework
of BrailleBlaster in SWT and presenting the GUI content with html in
the
browser control? When it is asked to produce UTDML liblouisutdml
produces output in Daisy xml format. This would work ni cely with a
browser if we have a way of presenting the menus and the Daisy and
Braille views.

What does the SWT browser control do if it gets a text file?

Thanks,
John

--
John J. Boyer; President, Chief Software Developer
Abilitiessoft, Inc.
http://www.abilitiessoft.com
Madison, Wisconsin USA
Developing software for people with disabilities

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