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

[Anthony Liguori]

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