Fair enough
Take care,
sina
-----Original Message-----
From: ethereal-dev-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:ethereal-dev-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Guy Harris
Sent: Wednesday, October 26, 2005 4:45 PM
To: Ethereal development
Subject: Re: [Ethereal-dev] Ethereal and accessibility?
Sina Bahram wrote:
> I do find it rather unfortunate that the design of the application was
> not done in such a way as to easily allow such a thing.
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.
So it's not as if the problem was...
> But sometimes, proper
> software engineering and getting a product out do conflict, especially
> when this portion of your target audience is small.
...a lack of "proper software engineering" on our part, it was more a lack
of support for accessibility in GTK+ at the time Ethereal was implemented.
You could perhaps argue that GTK+ should have had accessibility support
designed in from the beginning, but that's another issue of "getting
everything right" vs. "getting something out the door"
- not all the features everybody might want will necessarily show up in
version 1.0 of a product.
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).
A likely candidate would be somebody who would use Ethereal, is familiar
with ATK, and needs assistive technology to use it; another candidate might
be somebody willing to be paid to work on it (I'm already paid to work on
software elsewhere, so I'm not available for that).
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