Re: Developing cross-platform, accessible apps

  • From: Roopakshi Pathania <r_akshi_tgk@xxxxxxxxx>
  • To: programmingblind@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
  • Date: Sat, 12 Jun 2010 08:53:18 -0700 (PDT)

Hi Jamal,


You left out Java Accessibility API that provides access to Swing based 
applications on all platforms (not completely sure about Mac) through Java 
Access Bridge.
In this regard, the guidelines laid down by IBM on developing a completely 
accessible Java application are quite useful.
http://www-03.ibm.com/able/guidelines/software/accesssoftware.html

I like to point the developers of inaccessible applications to this page.

One more toolkit might be of interest: AxTk.
http://code.google.com/p/axtk/

It is built on wxWidgets and is especially geared towards screen reader users. 
It is also suppose to have text to speech wrapper class supporting a number of 
speech engines.

I’m building my own tools for financial and data analysis, so have looked at 
cross-platform accessible libraries.

Regards
Roopakshi

--- On Sat, 6/12/10, Jamal Mazrui <empower@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> From: Jamal Mazrui <empower@xxxxxxxxx>
> Subject: Developing cross-platform, accessible apps
> To: "programmingblind" <programmingblind@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>, 
> program-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
> Date: Saturday, June 12, 2010, 8:27 PM
> This is to share some points I have
> learned about developing cross-platform, GUI-accessible,
> desktop apps.  Currently, the key is using programming
> libraries that wrap native widgets of the platform. These
> native widgets generally implement the main accessibility
> API of the platform, much more so than custom widgets.
> 
> On Windows, native widgets are most likely to implement
> Microsoft Active Accessibility, or  increasingly, User
> Interface Automation as it replaces MSAA.  On Linux,
> the GTK+ widgets that are native to the Gnome desktop
> implement the Assistive Technology Service Provider
> Interface. On the Mac, Cocoa-based widgets implement the Mac
> Accessibility Protocol.
> 
> Thus, a cross-platform library is most likely to create
> accessible GUIs if it wraps native widgets of each platform,
> rather than defining its own widgets.  A disadvantage
> of this approach is that the developer needs to be conscious
> of small differences in the behavior of widgets across
> platforms, even though wrapping code of the library tries to
> minimize such differences.  Besides accessibility, an
> advantage of this approach is that widgets have the look and
> feel that sighted users are accustomed to experiencing on
> each platform.
> 
> Sometimes, a GUI library is closely associated with a
> programming language that has especially strong support for
> that library in wrapper functions and design tools.  A
> few language and library combinations that seem to work
> particularly well for cross-platform, accessible development
> are as follows:
> 
> *  Java and the Standard Widget Toolkit
> http://www.eclipse.org/swt/
> 
> *  Python and wxWidgets
> http://wxPython.org
> 
> *  C# and the System.Windows.Forms classes of the Mono
> Framework
> http://mono-project.org
> 
> Note that, in this case, the Microsoft .NET Framework
> should be used as the runtime environment on Windows in
> order to have native widget support.
> http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/netframework/default.aspx
> 
> If others have further info or ideas on this topic, please
> share.
> 
> Jamal
> 
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