Re: Accessible GUI Applications in Perl

[szabgab]

The Anonymous Monk has already mentioned pVoice which is the classic example of GUI written in Perl (wxWidgets in this case) and with a lot of love, caters to some kind of disability.

It is probably not the same accessibility issue you are facing but to ignorants like me they seem to be related.

I have been using wxPerl for some time now to build Padre an IDE for Perl. As a off-shot from that project I started to create a library to make it easy to add GUI to existing command line scripts.

Writing a real GUI application is very different from a command line application as the former is event driven. The module I wanted to create would help overcome the difficulty for the simple cases. It is in very early stages and I have not addressed any accessibility issues but I'd be glad if you checked out Wx::Perl::Dialog::Simple in Wx::Perl::Dialog and helped me in turning it into something that is really useful for such applications.

To address the four issues you raised

• Fully keyboard-navigable - this is up to the developer I think, You can do it with wxPerl
• The ability to work with assistive/adaptive technologies. - This is the area where I have no experience at all, but I'd love to get feedback on this.
• Tooltips are available.
• Cross-platform operation: Windows and Linux work quite well (after some installation troubles). I think OSX too, but I heard slightly more trouble there.

[smiffy]

OK, you've convinced me - Wx::Perl is worthy of investigation. I've just had a look at the WxWidgets site and it appears that accessibility is something that is being worked on.

Even if it's not there are the moment, the issue is being acknowledged and addressed which gives me hope that this could be the path for future accessible Perl GUI applications. (That is assuming that the Perl module is sufficiently transparent, but I'm sure that this could be fixed easily enough if it were not.)

I am now wondering about Tk again; further research has shown that Tk is MSAA-compliant, so accessibility has been addressed in the underlying toolkit. Whether the Perl Tk module is missing implementation of methods or if mention is simply missing from the man pages is something I'll have to investigate when I get the time.

I will, however, be looking at Wx in the first instance as the underlying project looks to be more 'fresh' than Tk.

[Anonymous Monk]

Besides Tk, there are thinner wrappers like Tkx, Tcl::Tk