Re: [XBoard-devel] JAWS builds [winboard]

[h.g. muller]

At 10:21 12-7-2009 -0600, Eric Mullins wrote:
> Right now there's no support for building a JAWS binary.
>
> From my browsing of the source, it looks like to do so, you:
> 1) #define JAWS for the build
> 2) use jaws.rc instead of winboard.rc
>
> Is that correct?

Yes, this is correct. That is how I did it, compile winboard.c with -DJAWS
and run wbres 'by hand' before clling make to do the other dies and linking.


> We need to remove item 2 so that it's automatic if JAWS is defined.  I can 
> do that, but there's a LOT of common code that should be shared, so it 
> would make sense to clean up the rc file at this time.  [otherwise, you 
> make a change to some odd dialog/menu/accelerator, and it only happens for 
> non-jaws binaries]

I agree, the files are nearly identical. I still want to look if jars.rc cannot
be completely eliminated. There are basically only 3 differences with the
standard version:

1) Some altered layout of dialogs (startup and time-control), to cause them
being read by JAWS in a more logical order. The new layout can be
incorporated without any problems in the standard version.

2) Many more accelerator keys are defined (and listed in the main menus
so people actually can know they exist). I made a lot of effort to ensure
that hardly any of them collide with what was already in use for WinBoard,
and Arun and I have already decided that it would be an asset for the
standard version to have these accelerators as well.

3) An extra pull-down menu, JAWS. I first tried to locate that to the right of
the help menu, but this evoked severe protests, as help is supposed to
be the rightmost menu and blind peple really rely on that. So we are stuck
with an extra menu between Options and Help in the JAWS version.

Now what I would like is that the JAWS version alters the menus at run time
to slip in this extra menu. Unfortunately to know if that is possible would
reqire me to actually understand how all these Windows API calls work,
and what all that data in the resource file actually means...