Setup.exe: Keyboard accessibility

Steve Holmes steve@holmesgrown.com
Tue Feb 22 16:18:00 GMT 2005


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Well, I hadn't looked at the code and admittedly, I'm not real
experienced in windows programming other than Visual Basic.  It's just
that I am very anxious to get this package selecter into some kind of
state where a blind person using a screen reader can viably use
Cygwin.  Everything else about Cygwin looks great considering my short
visit so far but selecting packages is nearly impossible! I can't
scroll the thing at all.  I can view the first page, click on items
and hear the results but scrolling, forget it!

I don't know anything about Qt but would be willing to learn and
attempt to help with it if a rewrite is considered.

Is there any other way to select packages than clicking a mouse on
this list? for Simplicity sake, I downloaded the entire collection of
259 packages but managed to scale down what gets installed.  What if I
just copied in the packages I would be interested in into the local
directory and kept the rest offline? Could setup.exe just offer to
install the ones it finds?  I know, this sounds more complicated than
using the control like I said before, I really can't use it effectly
in its present state.

Thanks for any additional ideas.

On Tue, Feb 22, 2005 at 03:21:14PM +0000, Barry Kelly wrote:
> On Tue, 22 Feb 2005 08:07:23 -0700, Steve Holmes <steve@holmesgrown.com> wrote:
> 
> > What kind of control is the package selection list?
> 
> It's a vanilla Windows window, done with old-fashioned explicit
> windows message handling: WM_PAINT, WM_LBUTTONDOWN, etc. Part of the
> problem is that it uses a bunch of custom class wrappers around
> Windows' controls: nothing wrong with that, but it reduces the
> maintainability and the readability of the code.
> 
> > I'm looking into
> > enabling it to work with the keyboard.  I think it will be easier to
> > scroll it that way.
> 
> One of the problems with the control is that it doesn't take focus,
> and it reacts differently when you click on different parts of the
> line. There's embedded checkboxes and what essentially amounts to a
> multi-state button embedded in every Cygwin package description.
> 
> Frankly, I think it would be easier to write a new interface. IMHO,
> the current interface is pretty dire from a usability standpoint,
> putting aside accessibility for a moment.
> 
> I hear Qt is now GPL'd for Windows. Perhaps it would be profitable to
> rewrite the interface in that?
> 
> 

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