Re: [Qemu-devel] [PATCH 0/6] Add GTK UI to enable basic accessibility

[Anthony Liguori <anthony@codemonkey.ws>]

Some screen shots:

http://www.codemonkey.ws/files/qemu-gtk/

Regards,

Anthony Liguori

On 02/19/2012 05:44 PM, Anthony Liguori wrote:
> Hi,
>
> 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.
>
>