Matthias:
I would argue that if all the widgets dealing with text really have the same needs, they should really support the same interface in GTK+, and there should be no need to write n adaptors for widget-with-text to atktext, but instead just one for text-widget-interface to atktext. And ideally, text-widget-interface and atktext would be so close to each other that that would be trivial.
I agree that providing more general text interfaces in the GTK+ layer directly would be best. The ATK layer would become much more thin and simple if this were done. Note that I had been just using AtkText as an example. It is a good example since it is a more complicated ATK interface. There are other ATK interfaces (AtkAction for all widgets that provide actions, AtkRelations to clarify widget relationships, AtkSelection for things that can be selected, etc). So there are other opportunities aside from text to improve GTK+ to provide information needed by AT programs in common ways. Above I say AtkText is particularly complicated. Note that the libgailutil.so library exists so that different text widgets can use common functions to do common things with text, such as getting text details from pango. So, people who write "n adaptors for widget- with-text to atktext" really do not have to reinvent the wheel each time. Some of the AtkText interfaces are not really used today, I should highlight. The braille displays that exist today do not support showing raised information at a resolution that would allow the user to feel how the screen looks. Instead most braille displays just show the text ASCII information in raised braille letters. However, the ATK was written to support more sophisticated devices in the future like ones that could present users with details they could feel like whether the text is bold, in italics, centered, size, whether letters have serifs, etc. Brian _______________________________________________ gnome-accessibility-devel mailing list [email protected] http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/gnome-accessibility-devel
