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AxTk
AxTk Summary
AxTk (pronounced Ay Ex Tee Kay) is an open source, C++ add-on for wxWidgets that helps developers create highly accessible, talking applications for users with impaired vision. It may also be useful for other impairments that benefit from a simplified user interface. AxTk features a new menu-based system that is easy to learn and use, in addition to providing adaptation for some existing GUI controls and dialogs. The developer can choose whether to use the menu system, or to adapt an existing application UI, or use a combination of methods. AxTk is cross-platform (tested so far on Windows XP, Linux and Mac OS X 10.5), and includes text-to-speech classes with the ability to drive SAPI 5, Apple Speech Synthesis Manager, eSpeak, and Cepstral. Other speech engines can be driven by writing additional handlers. |
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It would be nice to see this built in to the toolkit itself instead of as an add-on. It could then be up to the end user whether or not to enable this interface. Such a thing would then, in one single bound, put wxwidgets in a league of its own for accessibility. In window, the installation wizzard for applications could query the user whether or not they want this turned on. In Linux, it might be a library whose support is turned on or off at compile time by uncommenting a line in the makefile.
I've had pretty good experiences with the wxwidgets applications I've tried (Amaya being the one exception) since they are decently accessible for me with my screen reader. In Linux, on the other hand, the tale is quite different since wxgtk doesn't have atk/at-spi support built into te port. Stuff like Code::blocks, Audacity, Filezilla, and vlc media player which work well in Windows are a pain to use in gnome with Orca, the current screen reader being used on that platform. If wxwidgets itself had axtk built in such that developers had to do very little if anything at all to enable support for it and then giving the end user the choice of whether or not to turn it on sounds like just what the doctor ordered to correct this situation.
Alex M
AxTk