Josh et al,
I also find myself in a similar situation (minus, of course, the
development of audio games, but that’s mostly due to a lack of knowledge of
where to get a sufficient number of sound effects). In my case, one of
the problems that I’ve had with actually acquiring a Mac was the sheer
impossibility of developing GUI-based apps, and the attitude amongst the
developer community that vision was a requirement for such things (something
which, I am glad to see, is becoming a thing of the past, and more rapidly than
was the case in Windows development (though I could make the argument that the
strides made in Windows development might have helped this process move more
quickly)). Thus far, the only solution that I’ve found for
reasonably rapid UI development without Interface Builder is GNUstep Renaissance, and
that tends to suffer from the same problem that any cross-platform GUI
framework tends to run into—that of having the lowest common denominator of
widgets available to all supported platforms, not to mention the fact that it
appears to be in perpetual beta. At any rate, I would also be curious to
find a solution to this, or, at the very least, be keen to add my voice to
those that might find such a project useful—particularly as, if I’m
remembering correctly, Apple’s Human Interface Guidelines are strict
enough that adhering to them could be made an automated process, which would
eliminate the old chestnut that certainly used to be given in response to this question,
that being how a blind developer could possibly line up their controls appropriately.
BOY that was long.
-C-
From:
accessibility-dev-bounces+tallin32=email@hidden
[mailto:accessibility-dev-bounces+tallin32=email@hidden] On
Behalf Of Josh de Lioncourt
Sent: Thursday, October 09, 2008 3:53 PM
To: email@hidden
Subject: Accessible development
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...