WxPython versus Tkinter.

Octavian Rasnita orasnita at gmail.com
Wed Jan 26 02:27:43 EST 2011


From: "Nicholas Devenish" <misnomer at gmail.com>
> Octavian, we get it - you are on the warpath about accessibility. And this 
> is, in a way, a good thing, because, yes, programmers should in general 
> think more about accessibility when designing their programs. But nobody 
> was ever persuaded to consider a complicated and subtle issue by hostile 
> holier-than-thou arrogance, which is what rantingricks posts started out 
> with, and what your posts have been slowly turning into. This is what is 
> 'not a good thing', in case you genuinely didn't understand the context of 
> my previous message. Look at the response your earlier posts got, with 
> experienced developers showing an interest in actually trying out 
> accessibility tools. Compare this with the defensive replies you have been 
> getting more recently.

Hi Nicholas,

Thank you for your nice words. I admit that I don't understand absolutely 
everything (for example I have met "holier-than-thou" only in a song of 
Metallica, but I don't know what it really means :-)
I know only that Tk is very old and it is still not accessible and it 
doesn't mean too much if some developers say that they are interested in 
making it accessible, because even with a hard work, a GUI lib like Tkinter 
may be made accessible only after years of work, because the accessibility 
standards change, the main OS used by the majority of users also change... 
and I thought that Python already offers a solution for this problem. 
However I can see that for the moment it doesn't offer it because WxPython 
is not compatible with Python 3.
(I am wondering if there would be any change if Python 3 could be used with 
WxPython).

> But this thread is not about that, and the accessibility issue is mostly a 
> red herring that rantingrick has grabbed hold of to swing around like a 
> battleaxe, because nobody is going to say that accessibility doesn't 
> matter. Discrimination in many forms, is a real problem in our societies, 
> and one that is not going to be solved overnight, much as you might wish 
> it. Stigmatizing perfectly repectful people who haven't encountered your 
> needs before, or don't agree that accessibility is the only thing that 
> matters, is not going to solve any issues.


Well, I am on this list just for a few weeks, and I don't know yet who is 
respectable and who is not, who is an expert or not, and so on.
I just expressed my opinion that if there is a solution for accessibility it 
should be prefered and it should be promoted by Python.
Actually this is the main idea.

Nobody should force the developers to use that accessible solution, but 
those who don't use it should understand and accept that they are using a 
not recommended and a wrong tool.
Of course that there may be many cases in which such a wrong tool would be 
prefered for commercial reasons, but the developers that do that should 
understand that they are doing something wrong.

Octavian





More information about the Python-list mailing list