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

[Octavian Rasnita]

From: "Grant Edwards" <invalid at invalid.invalid>
> On 2011-01-19, Octavian Rasnita <orasnita at gmail.com> wrote:
>> From: "Adam Skutt" <askutt at gmail.com>
> 
>>> 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.
>>
>>
>> Not true. WxPython uses wxWIDGETS which uses the default OS widgets
> 
> There's no such thing as "default OS widgets" on Linux/Unix/BSD/etc.
> 
>> which usually offer the accessibility features. (At least under
>> Windows, but most users that need accessibility use Windows anyway).
> 
> [...]
> 
>> WxPython is not perfect but most of the objects it offers are
>> accessible so this is not true. Only Tk and GTK are bad.
> 
> On all of my computers, wxPython uses Gtk.  There are other choices
> for wxWidget backends on Linux, but Gtk is by far the most common.
> IOW, if Gtk is bad, then wxPython is bad.


Not true. Gtk is accessible under Linux but it is not accessible under Windows.

I am not talking from the perspective of what the GUI creators say, but about the reality.

Adobe and Microsoft say that Flash and Silverlight are accessible because they offer accessibility features, but this is practically absolutely unimportant for the users, because the current screen readers don't offer support for them, so they are hard accessible respectively not accessible.

I don't know why Gtk is not accessible under Windows but it can be accessed fine under Linux with Orca screen reader.

Either it doesn't offer the accessibility features in its Windows version, or it offers the same thing under Windows but the screen readers that work under Windows don't offer support for it.
I'd say that Silverlight is pretty new and it is expected that it is not accessible, but Gtk, QT and Tk are old enough but there is no support for them yet.
Under Windows there are open source screen readers also, one of them beeing NVDA, which is made in Python, so we are not talking only about commercial programs that might not offer this support because of a commercial interest, however those screen readers don't offer support for those GUIS.

Orca, the most used screen reader used under Linux is also made in Python, but under Linux it can access fine the Gtk interface.

So I don't know why, but maybe it is hard for the screen reader manufacturers to make them support absolutely all the possible interfaces so they choose to support only the most used GUI under each OS.

So the better term would be "the most used GUI type" and not "the default GUI type" for each OS.

But I as I said, all these things can be tested using that screen reader I told you about.
If you use Windows, and you have an application which is made using QT, Tk or Gtk, you can download JAWS from www.freedomscientific.com, install it and try to see what you hear when you use that application and you will see that you won't hear anything, while in an application that uses wxWIDGETS or standard Win32 GUI or MFC, the most used controls are perfectly accessible.

Octavian