From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Received: from eggs.gnu.org ([140.186.70.92]:37657) by lists.gnu.org with esmtp (Exim 4.71) (envelope-from ) id 1RzGfd-000843-Kt for qemu-devel@nongnu.org; Sun, 19 Feb 2012 18:59:58 -0500 Received: from Debian-exim by eggs.gnu.org with spam-scanned (Exim 4.71) (envelope-from ) id 1RzGfc-00031Q-Bx for qemu-devel@nongnu.org; Sun, 19 Feb 2012 18:59:57 -0500 Received: from mail-tul01m020-f173.google.com ([209.85.214.173]:51368) by eggs.gnu.org with esmtp (Exim 4.71) (envelope-from ) id 1RzGfc-00031M-8s for qemu-devel@nongnu.org; Sun, 19 Feb 2012 18:59:56 -0500 Received: by obbup16 with SMTP id up16so7415621obb.4 for ; Sun, 19 Feb 2012 15:59:55 -0800 (PST) Message-ID: <4F418CF7.8080308@codemonkey.ws> Date: Sun, 19 Feb 2012 17:59:51 -0600 From: Anthony Liguori MIME-Version: 1.0 References: <1329695104-15174-1-git-send-email-aliguori@us.ibm.com> In-Reply-To: <1329695104-15174-1-git-send-email-aliguori@us.ibm.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Subject: Re: [Qemu-devel] [PATCH 0/6] Add GTK UI to enable basic accessibility List-Id: List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , To: Anthony Liguori Cc: qemu-devel@nongnu.org, Alex Graf 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. > >