Tkinter: The good, the bad, and the ugly!

[Adam Skutt]

On Jan 18, 3:23 pm, "Octavian Rasnita" <orasn... at gmail.com> wrote:
> From: "Alexander Kapps" <alex.ka... at web.de>
>
> > Tkinter causes damage? Very bad damage? What are you talking about?
>
> I am talking about the fact that Python promotes Tkinter, and many beginners will start using it, and they will start creating applications with it, and they will learn to use it better than WxPython, and they will start believing that Tkinter is better because it is easier to use than WxPython, so they will start convincing others that Tkinter is the best, and they will start finding many reasons that show that Tkinter is better. And after this, they will say that they don't care about the real problems generated by GUIs like Tk.
> And a very big problem is that the applications that use Tk/GTK are not accessible for screen readers, so those applications will be just blank for people with visual impairments which need to use a screen reader.

If you want functional accessibility support, you're going to have to
write it in Python yourself, and get the accessibility manufacturers
to support it.  All of the cross-platform toolkits have poor to non-
existent accessibility support.  Accessibility issues aren't going to
be fixed by going to a different GUI toolkit in the standard library.
The alternative is to fix the accessibility support issues in the
underlying library, and Tk is no less amenable to that than
wxWidgets.  If that's what you want, start coding then.  You have a
long climb ahead of you.

Accessibility will never be a particular good argument for switching
toolkits.  All of the cross-platform offerings with Python bindings
are far too broken to be even remotely interesting.

> Why do we like the portable GUIS and don't really like the native interfaces that don't work on other platforms?
> Because we want our programs to be usable by as many people as possible. Well, some platforms render the output as sound and Tkinter are not "portable" on those platforms (screen readers).

Or we have cross-platform support as a requirement and no desire to
develop the GUI interface three times over.  Hence the continued
popularity of Java GUIs.

Adam