[macvoiceover] Re: Fw: Article on Firefox and VoiceOver
- From: Travis Siegel <windowbridge@xxxxxxx>
- To: macvoiceover@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Thu, 21 Aug 2008 17:23:15 -0500
Actually, I'm relatively surprised at this article.
For several reasons, but foremost, I had no idea mozilla was working
so hard for general accessibility capabilities on multiple operating
systems.
That's great to know.
As for a secondary screen reader on osx, there's nothing at all
preventing anyone from making one, since all of the base system source
is available in the darwin project.
I have no idea how much work it would be to port one of the existing
screen readers to darwin, but once that's done, there's nothing to
prevent it from being used on osx afterwords, and since open darwin
needs a screen reader anyhow, I honestly think this would be an
excellent use of resources.
Failing that, someone who is better at disassembling code than I am
can easily obtain all the information necessary to have their screen
reader get the same info voice over does, simply by writing small
modules that talk to the screen reader core apis, and see what info
they get back. After several of these modules are put together, and
worked over to provide complete access, you could (in effect) reverse
engineer the voiceover screen reader component. (this is how I got
nearly all of the utilities I wrote for the artic technology
notetakers written) It's a long and drawn out process, frustrating at
times, and of course, will (likely) find unknown bugs with the
technology (I found one with artics book reader application this way)
but the positive side is, it will eventually work. Redhat did this
with windows as well, when adding samba support into their linux
distribution.
This is likely the only approach that will give satisfactory results
with the existing technology (meaning voiceover) but again, there's
nothing saying this approach couldn't be used to build a secondary
screen reader that conforms to the needs of the mozilla community.
All the apis are there, documented (mostly) and available for anyone
to use. Someone with sufficient knowledge, time, and programming
capabilities could easily (ok, maybe not easily), produce a 3rd-party
application that could talk to mozilla, then filter the results back
to voiceover for the actual speaking, while simply calling the vo
routines to perform any additional speaking that may be necessary on
the parts of the interface that vo doesn't/can't handle on it's own.
Admittedly, it's not a simple fix, and it will take time, but it is
possible, and if there is enough demand, this is likely the approach
that will have to be taken.
Could I do this? Not likely, although I'm a relatively decent
programmer when it comes to normal everyday tasks, I don't have the
knowledge necessary to tie apple interfacing into the mix, nor could I
do so even if I did know how, because (as pointed out here in this
article) apple still has a bit to go for complete accessibility, and
it's developer tools make it possible, but extremely difficult (though
considerably easier than it used to be) for a blind programmer to
develop an entire product from ed to end w/o sighted assistance, and
in my case, that assistance just isn't available.
I could of course, test, add patches, and perform other tasks required
to ensure smooth operations, but this task is a bit beyond me, or I'd
be perfectly happy to volunteer for it.
But, in any case, I agree, that something definitely needs done on
this front, as I said, I had no idea mozilla was working so hard on
the behalf of accessibility.
Now I need to go take a look at their site, and see if I can
contribute somehow. :)
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