| Hi all,
I hope this question is enough on topic here that someone may be able to offer some suggestions or assistance.
I'm a visually impaired software developer and have worked in Windows for many years. I've been a Mac/VoiceOver convert for several years now as well, but have continued to develop for WIndows for several reasons, which will become apparent shortly.
I've had two separate threads I've been following to try to make the leap to Mac development in an accessible way, both with very little in the way of results.
1. Developing apps with a traditional GUI by the accepted methods is not currently possible. Interface Builder is not accessible enough with VoiceOver yet to allow any meaningful development with that tool. (IB team is aware and working on a solution.) I've managed to scrounge up, thanks to some other Cocoa developers, some very minimal examples of building Cocoa interfaces by code, but the process appears to be ridiculously time consuming to do that way, (not to mention impractical for long-term support). Even if I chose to go that route, the lack of documentation and/or examples on that method of UI development could leave me floundering for quite some time.
Because of all of that, I continued to pursue another option. I delved into Java development for Mac, having noted previously that Java Swing apps were supposed to be accessible. Much to my frustration, while there is some access, there are also a great many limitations. Text fields were not reading correctly, and there seemed to be no access to the contents of cells in JTable controls.
Is there another, more accessible way of developing these sorts of applications on the Mac?
2. On a separate thread, I've been looking at porting many of our Windows products to Mac. These apps are audio games for the blind, and have no GUI, save for an empty window to allow the user to give the application focus while playing. The interface is otherwise audio-based. I chose GLut for these projects, only to come up short there as well, as the glut timer functions don't seem to work properly under OS X, which is unfortunate, as we were hoping that by employing GLut in C++ apps, we could make porting between Windows and Mac a relatively painless process.
Ideally, I need a way to practically create Cocoa GUI interfaces, mostly separate from the C++ code of the apps I intend to produce and port between platforms. I'd rather not use GLut at all, if I can avoid it, especially now that much of its basic functionality seems to be questionable.
This does not seem like it should be such a problem, but every time I come close to a solution, I hit another wall. Josh de Lioncourt
...my other mail provider is an owl...
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