RE: Accessibility within XCode
RE: Accessibility within XCode
- Subject: RE: Accessibility within XCode
- From: "Saqib Shaikh" <email@hidden>
- Date: Fri, 6 May 2005 06:11:33 +0100
Hi Chris
Unfortunately I've spent over a year fighting this battle. I have wanted to
use Interfface Builder for more than a year, have contacted people on this
list, at apple's accessibility team, advanced mac programmers around the
world, people from various apple mailing lists even apple engineers.
Everyone unanimously says it is possible but they don't know how.
In Windows dragging and dropping components is a front end for writing text
files, in Interface Builder it is the main way of programming GUIs.
Interface Builder actually creates serialised objects on the fly.
So your choices are:
1. Use the GNUStep XML based UI mechanism, and produce applications that
look all wrong.
Learn the recommended size of every component, and the recommended distance
between different components - Apple's Human Interface guidelines tell you
this. I have tried to write apps this way but it is so boring.
Finally I don't have many sighted friends with the time to help me, but if I
did this would be the way forward. They could design a UI in 20 minutes;
manually in Cocoa this would probably take me several weeks <grin>.
So I have tried for over a year and basically given up. In Tiger Apple also
introduced CoreData which is again another inherantly visual way of
programming with no textual backend. And because it is so non-trivial you
will only find two examples in the whole wide world of how to use Cocoa to
make GUIs.
Contact me off-list - I'd like to discuss this further. Saqib
-----Original Message-----
From: accessibility-dev-bounces+me=email@hidden
[mailto:accessibility-dev-bounces+me=email@hidden] On
Behalf Of Chris Meredith
Sent: 05 May 2005 21:16
To: email@hidden
Subject: Accessibility within XCode
Greetings and salutations.
I'm hoping I'm not the first person to have asked this, but here goes. I'm
wanting to develop software for MacOS 10.4 (and, really, who wouldn't?).
I'm using ... or, rather, attempting to use ...
XCode (nothing new there; EVERYONE uses XCode to develop on 10.4,
yeah?). Here's where it gets interesting. I'm completely blind.
That's right, couldn't see an enlarged 30X replica of my hand three inches
from my face. What I'm hoping is that some creative mind here knows how I
might design a UI either without using Interface Builder (I mean it. I'd
rather create the whole schmear at runtime in Objective C than have to find,
which translates to, "contract", a sighted person to design every dialog
box, form, application window, toolbar, and message box for me (expensive
proposition, that one)), or using Interface Builder in conjunction with
VoiceOver (It's very keen on telling me about a "scroll area" there in the
Instances tab, but refuses to tell me what's in it. And as to finding the
controls to drop on the window, it's helpful like the local weather forecast
scrolling across my screen is helpful to me. =) ) I'm to the point where,
if need be, I'd do all my dev work on a PC and testing on my iBook, but,
right now, having a sighted person draw my interfaces is impractical, and
command line apps don't really sell.
Regards,
Chris
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