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

[Octavian Rasnita]

From: "Adam Skutt" <askutt at gmail.com>
The fact that /every/ toolkit provides accessibility guidelines over
and above whatever other UI guidelines they provide tells me that
creating an accessible application is hardly obvious.  Plus, if it
were really that simple, the accessibility situation wouldn't be so
poor.

:-)
Where do you got the conclusion that the accessibility is so poor?
The accessibility is not so great under Mac and under Linux it is less 
advanced than under Windows, but under Windows the accessibility is usually 
very good for most apps.
All the standard Windows programs are accessible, all the DotNet programs 
are generally accessible, SWT and wxWIDGETS - based programs are accessible, 
SWING-based GUIS are also pretty accessible and even more strange interfaces 
like the one found in Winamp are accessible.
Even Flash have a very limited accessibility although I think it is too much 
to say that it is accessible.

But You keep telling me that it is hard to create accessible programs, which 
is false, but you don't know and don't want to try to see.
Try to create a WxPython app that doesn't do anything but only displays some 
menus, buttons, combo boxes, list boxes, list views, tree views, text 
fields, check boxes, radio buttons... and you will see that they are very 
accessible with that screen reader I told you about, without requiring you 
to do anything special that you wouldn't do otherwise.


> Yes, those things should be followed for creating a better app, but what I 
> wanted to say is that no matter if you do those things or not in a Tk, Gtk 
> or QT GUI, they will be useless, because the screen readers can't 
> understand those GUIS even they have text labels, and even if you will see 
> a focus rectangle around buttons. They don't report that those objects 
> have the focus so the screen readers won't speak anything.

Your "something is better than nothing" argument isn't particularly
compelling to me personally as a justification for ripping out
TkInter.  And Qt is the only toolkit with some level of functioning
accessibility support on all three major platforms, assuming the
library and software are built correctly, so again, your argument is
really for Qt, not for wxWidgets.


How do you came to the conclusion that QT is accessible on all operating 
system? I haven't seen any QT-based accessible interface, but WxPython 
offers that thing without any effort.

When you talk about accessibility, try it yourself and don't take the word 
of the GUI widgets developers.

Octavian