[Mono-osx] Information about monodevelop and accessibility

[Sandy Armstrong]

(Don't forget to reply-all so that your response goes to the list)

On Wed, Apr 21, 2010 at 6:39 PM, Sauro Cesaretti
<saurocesaretti1983 at gmail.com> wrote:
> Thank you very much for your indication.
> and do you have any idea if it will be accessible an interface developed with windows form in mac osx?

This I'm actually much more qualified to talk about.  Winforms
applications are completely NOT accessible on Mac OS X.  However,
making them accessible would be a bit easier than making GTK+
applications accessible.

The Mono Accessibility project [0] is primarily concerned with
implementing Microsoft's UI Automation standard on Linux.  One part of
the project is making Winforms applications accessible.  The
architecture [1] of how this works is pretty simple...you would just
need to include the mono-a11y project's assemblies (UIAutomationTypes,
UIAutomationBridge, UIAutomationProvider, UIAutomationWinforms) with
the winforms app.  But then you'd have to implement a new
IAutomationBridge [2] that translated from UIA providers to Apple's
a11y infrastructure on OS X.

I've thought about doing this as a side project, but realistically
that's probably not going to happen.  But if you'd like to work on it,
the team that develops this part of Mono is available in #mono-a11y on
GIMPNet.

> I'm thinking to write the code with a normal texteditor and execute it with the interpreter.
> What kind of interface is better so that I can check the result correctly with voiceover?

I'd assume that Terminal works well in voiceover, so I'd recommend you
build from the command line.  You can either run the compiler
directly, use makefiles to organize your build, or even use xbuild to
build msbuild files (the .sln and .csproj files created by Visual
Studio and MonoDevelop).  None of these tools are Mac-specific, so you
can ask for help on the regular mailing list and IRC channel if you
want.

Sandy

[0] http://mono-project.com/Accessibility
[1] http://mono-project.com/Accessibility:_Architecture
[2] http://anonsvn.mono-project.com/viewvc/trunk/uia2atk/UIAutomation/UIAutomationBridge/Mono.UIAutomation.Bridge/IAutomationBridge.cs