Ethereal-dev: Re: [Ethereal-dev] Ethereal and accessibility?

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From: Mike Duigou <ethereal@xxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Wed, 26 Oct 2005 17:19:26 -0700
Guy Harris wrote:
The application was originally designed and written before GTK+ *had* any support for accesibility - it was originally written for GTK+ 1.0, and then converted to support 1.0 and 1.2 (and then the 1.0 support was removed), and then converted to support both 1.2 and 2.0.

I looked online to see if I could figure out why Ethereal still supports GTK 1.2. The most relevant page seemed to be from the wiki :

http://wiki.ethereal.com/Development/DropWin32GTK1

Which I note hasn't been updated in about a year. Has anything changed with the GTK2 situation on Windows?

Are there any plans to phase out GTK 1.X? (and depending upon the answer, "When?" or "Why not?") Perhaps a wiki page could be added to preserve the current answer and foster future discussion as things evolve.

It might be useful if somebody who had the time to audit the GUI code and make the changes needed to support ATK - ideally in such a fashion as to handle GTK+ 1.2 as well. This might involve doing more wrapping of raw GTK+ APIs than we're doing now, and modifying existing wrappings (GTK+'s APIs aren't always enough - there's no convenient way, at least in GTK+ 1.2, to create a dialog box and *automatically* arrange that the Esc key close it, the Enter key activate an "OK" button, etc., so we have a bunch of wrappers for those things).

Some ATK support should come "automagically" by just switching to GTK 2.X APIs. For things like menus and text edit controls the ATK support is built right in for the standard controls. The developer doesn't need to do anything special for basic support. You do still need to do some work to make sure icon buttons are labelled, etc.

I'm not experienced with the ATK APIs but I'd be very willing to help test and have access to Windows PCs with JAWS and Window Eyes (the two most popular screen readers in North America) and to Linux and Solaris PCs with Gnome 2.6 and 2.10 for gnopernicus.

Mike