Re: [Qemu-devel] [PATCH 0/8] Add GTK UI to enable basic accessibility (v2)

[malc]

On Sun, 26 Feb 2012, Anthony Liguori wrote:

> I realize UIs are the third rail of QEMU development, but over the years I've
> gotten a lot of feedback from users about our UI.  I think everyone struggles
> with the SDL interface and its lack of discoverability but it's worse than I
> think most people realize for users that rely on accessibility tools.
> 
> The two pieces of feedback I've gotten the most re: accessibility are the lack
> of QEMU's enablement for screen readers and the lack of configurable
> accelerators.
> 
> Since we render our own terminal using a fixed sized font, we don't respect
> system font settings which means we ignore if the user has configured large
> print.
> 
> We also don't integrate at all with screen readers which means that for blind
> users, the virtual consoles may as well not even exist.
> 
> We also don't allow any type of configuration of accelerators.  For users with
> limited dexterity (this is actually more common than you would think), they 
> may
> use an input device that only inputs one key at a time.  Holding down two keys
> at once is not possible for these users.
> 
> These are solved problems though and while we could reinvent all of this
> ourselves with SDL, we would be crazy if we did.  Modern toolkits, like GTK,
> solve these problems.
> 
> By using GTK, we can leverage VteTerminal for screen reader integration and 
> font
> configuration.  We can also use GTK's accelerator support to make accelerators
> configurable (Gnome provides a global accelerator configuration interface).
> 
> I'm not attempting to make a pretty desktop virtualization UI.  Maybe we'll go
> there eventually but that's not what this series is about.
> 
> This is just attempting to use a richer toolkit such that we can enable basic
> accessibility support.  As a consequence, the UI is much more usable even for 
> a
> user without accessibility requirements so it's a win-win.
> 
> Also available at:
> 
> https://github.com/aliguori/qemu/tree/gtk.2
> 
> ---
> v1 -> v2
>  - Add internationalization support.  I don't actually speak any other 
> languages
>    so I added a placeholder for a German translation.  This can be tested with
>    LANGUAGE=de_DE.UTF-8 qemu-system-x86_64

gnome-terminal, well basically every terminal that isn't konsole, is
utterly incapable of rendering anything with complex shaping 
(devanagari/gurumukhi/whatever for instance), i'd go on a limb and say
that it's defficiency in the underlying terminal emulation (VteTerminal?),
so claiming to support internationalization is disingenuous.


>  - Fixed the terminal size for VteTerminal widgets.  I think the behavior 
> makes
>    sense now.
>  - Fixed lots of issues raised in review comments (see individual patches)
> 
> Known Issues:
>  - I saw the X crash once.  I think it has to do with widget sizes.  I need to
>    work harder to reproduce.
>  - I've not recreated the reported memory leak yet.
>  - I haven't added backwards compatibility code for older VteTerminal widgets
>    yet.
> 
> 

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