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

[Anthony Liguori <anthony@codemonkey.ws>]

On 02/27/2012 02:21 AM, Jan Kiszka wrote:
> On 2012-02-27 00:46, 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
>>   - 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.
>
> Looks quite nice but still has some rough edges:
> - full screen doesn't work, at least here

How does it fail?  It works for me.  What distro are you on?

> - lacking support for auto-grabbing in absolute mouse mode

What do you mean by auto grabbing?

> - unscaling (ctrl-alt-u) is lacking

Since we scale by 25% up and down, I figured it wasn't strictly necessary 
anymore because it's very easy to zoom back to the original size.  It's easy 
enough to add though.

> - window not resizable (except in broken full-screen mode)

That's intentional.

>
> Will see if I find some time to look into this.
>
> Is this also working properly under Windows? Otherwise we probably can't
> deprecate SDL - or would have to provide a native Windows GUI.

It should, but it doesn't right now most likely because of the glib event loop 
being broken on win32.

> As we have a menu now, I would suggest to add some handy monitor
> commands there as well, like reset or powerdown.

Absolutely.  I wanted to start with something very simple though first.

Regards,

Anthony Liguori

> Jan
>