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

[Stefan Weil <sw@weilnetz.de>]

Am 27.02.2012 00:46, schrieb Anthony Liguori:
> 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.

Hi Anthony,

are you still working on a new version of this patch series?

I suggest to commit a slightly modified version of v2 which adds the
GTK UI as an optional user interface (only enabled by a configure option).

This makes testing easier and allows developers to send patches which
improve the new UI.

As soon as the GTK UI is considered stable and usable, the default
could be changed from SDL to GTK.

Regards,
Stefan Weil

PS. Of course the committed patches should pass checkpatch.pl without 
errors.