On Wednesday 11 April 2001 20:39, Tomas Valusek wrote:
> Hello,
>
> is it possible to create applications in Squeak without using a mouse, ie.
> using only the keyboard? How to use a speech synthesizer from Squeak in
> Windows?

You can (with care) make applications in Squeak that don't require mousing.
It depends on what you're doing, of course. Note that Squeak doesn't really 
have anything you could consider a standard text widget other than the 
PluggableText* and PluggableList* family.

In Morphic, Tab will navigate between text fields, and list boxes will scroll 
to the first matching entry when a key is hit over them. But you can't 
ordinarily tab into or out of a list box.

A standard Windows speech synthesizer will not work with Squeak directly. 
This is because Squeak does not use the standard Windows API for displaying 
text, dialogs, and menus.

Squeak does have its own speech synthesizer, but it probably doesn't do as 
good a job on text-to-speech as commercial units do.

I'd say, over all, that Squeak out of the box is not very "accessible".

If you want to use Squeak in a system that was set up for speech use (and not 
have to program all the accessibility hooks from scratch) you'd be best off 
trying to use it via a different interface (web or standard Windows API). 
However, I haven't seen any finished Windows API implementations yet (though 
they're being worked on).

If you can stand working through a web browser, Squeak can do quite a good 
job as a server platform (especially with Comanche and ComSwiki).

If you just want to use Smalltalk, you might consider Dolphin or 
Smalltalk/MT, both of which use the standard Windows widgets, and thus would 
be easier to use with off-the-shelf accessibility products.

-- 
Ned Konz
currently: Stanwood, WA
email:     ned at bike-nomad.com
homepage:  http://bike-nomad.com