Last week I was doing my best to dive into the wonderful world of Windows accessibility. So to flatten the curve, I decided to take shot at making a lightweight Python MSAA client library, Pyia.
It is heavily inspired by pyatspi‘s class mixins. pyOrbit made it very easy to do this in pyatspi, making CORBA friendly and Pythonic. Comtypes, does the same in Windows, making COM cool as a cucumber.
Accessible objects emulate containers for easy access to children nodes. Also notice a few convienient methods, like getDesktop which returns the desktop client. Also getStateName will return a human readable list of states rather than a bitmask.

>>> import pyia
>>> desktop = pyia.getDesktop()
>>> for window in desktop:
        if not window.accState(0) &
          pyia.STATE_SYSTEM_INVISIBLE:
          print window
[window | ]
[window | Python Shell]
[window | Mozilla Firefox Start Page - Mozilla Firefox]
[window | Program Manager]
>>> desktop[14].accStateName()
u'unavailable invisible'

This might be a bad idea, but I added some AT-SPI concepts, for example a registry, where you connect event callbacks. Also, events are wrapped in structures with a “source” field that is a reference to the accessible that is responsible for the event. There is no extra wire traffic because the reference is not retrieved until the source field is either explicitly called, or the event is printed (converted to a string).

>>> import pyia
>>> def event_cb(event):
        print event
>>> pyia.Registry.registerEventListener(
        event_cb, pyia.EVENT_OBJECT_FOCUS)
>>> pyia.Registry.start()
gainFocus
        source: [client | Mozilla Firefox Start Page - Mozilla Firefox]
        window: 524618
        thread: 568
        tstamp: 14692927
gainFocus
        source: [client | Python Shell]
        window: 1573178
        thread: 352
        tstamp: 14694599
>>>

You could try this stuff out by checking it out from Github.
If that is too much overhead, here is a binary Windows installer.
You will need the comtypes Python module.

I used to love sahlab from a mix when I was in Israel. Unfortunately, I didn’t know how to make it until recently. If you are going to be in Istanbul this summer, you will probably get the real stuff. Oh, how I envy you.

• Half a liter of milk.
• 3 tbs. of corn starch.
• 2 tbs. sugar.
• 1 tbs. orange flower or rose water.

Pour milk in saucepan, leaving about a third of a cup out. Use the remaining milk to emulsify the corn starch. Boil the milk in the saucepan with the lid on. When the milk comes to a boil, add the emulsified corn starch, sugar and flower water. Continue stirring on a medium flame until the milk thickens.
Pour in to cups and garnish with crushed nuts and cinamon.
The flavor that I am familiar with comes from “mey zahar”, orange flower water, I was surprised to find this stuff in QFC in the cocktail mixer section.

I know that I am supposed to be all gratuitous and all when it comes to translators who do a thankless job, and improve software by orders of magnitude to make them accessible to many locales. I usually am very thankful.
In the past month I have briefly turned my back Accerciser trunk, and in that time some cuddly translator managed to bugger it not once, but twice.
Once when someone uncommented a comment in the LINGUAS file, which resulted in an unconfigurable tree. Another time when someone changed a *.po file to have executable permissions. This was more annoying, since there is some script there in s.g.o’s guts that rejects any commit if the repo has an executable. Now you know me, I never look at the output message after I commit to SVN, especially now since I am doing it through git. Result: all my commits to Accerciser in the last month have been rejected, and I never realized it.
I know what you all are thinking:

1. Why don’t you just look into the Subversion history, and see who is messing with you? Well, I prefer to remain ignorant, and make sweeping accusations – I am bored.
2. How in hell did an executable po file get into the repo in the first place? I don’t know, and searching for the answer might lead me to the answer of the first question, so I won’t bother.

This last couple of months has been characterized by random bursts of productivity. After I reached all of the deliverables from my last Mozilla Foundation grant, I decided to give it another liberal reinterpretation, and have just been picking up different bits and pieces of Orca, and found stuff that interested me to work on.

Contracted Braille

This work has mostly been completed in early march. Since we are depending on an external library, liblouis, one of the most important tasks was to get liblouis into a shape that could allow it to be shipped in major distros. All sorts of distros arose, from packaging to licensing. Luckily, John Boyer has been extremely helpful, and thanks to the ViewPlus folks, we were able to get liblouis re-licensed as LGPL 3. I am maintaining liblouis and liblouisxml “forks” that are autotooled and easy to install and package for distributions. Hopefully the main development and releases will be on these autotooled versions, making users lives easier, and getting distributions to package it.

Firefox Braille Support

When I was working on the contracted braille bit, I noticed that cursor routing was not yet implemented in our Firefox support. I got basic braille display cursor routing support to work in Firefox, and also link following support. A braille display user does not have to take her fingers off the braille display to surf the web. This is neat.

Mouse Review

When I was playing with a friend’s Wii, I noticed how cool and easy it is to point and click with the controller to type in your name on an on-screen keyboard from across the room. It was easy because of the “resistance” the controller’s motor emitted. This made me think of how we could apply that in Orca: with one of those vibrating gaming mice, and with speaking the current component we could allow low-vision (maybe even blind?) users get a better picture of the graphical interface, and allow folks to use the mouse for those tasks that have no keyboard access. I thought I deserved a Nobel prize.
When I got to CSUN, I discovered that this is actually not a new idea at all. Some products already do that. Even NVDA does it by default. Mike said it would be a useful feature, so I hacked away during CSUN, and had something to show in the final days. Mouse review mode is available in development versions of Orca today, and will be in our 2.24 release.

Script Support Refactor

One of the stuff that I have been thinking about since I got involved in Orca is how do we add support for non-application customizations. For example, today it is possible for core or third party developers to extend Orca and override the default behavior and allow better access for specific applications like Evolution. We needed a way to support similar scripts, but for web applications like GMail too. When I took a look at how the source tree looked, I realized that there is an opportunity for a refactor. Last July just before GUADEC I got so excited about refactoring Orca’s codebase, that I even drew up pretty UML diagrams and attached them to a bug report. I met Willie Walker for the first time in GUADEC. He apologized for dousing my enthusiasm, but there were bigger tasks at the time than large-scale cleanups. Before CSUN we re-targeted web application scripting as a certain priority, and my refactor ideas were finally heard! The entire team stayed supportive and kept an open mind while I spliced files and created a lot of new directories. The diagram below is the UML I made last year.