development of a development editor

wxPython Users
1

Hello Everyone,

I have a quite ambitious project ahead of me, but I feel it will be worth it in the long end.

Some background:

I am blind. I have been a software engineer for the last 20 years. I have worked with a lot of the more major languages, and some not so major. Anyways, I’ve used all kinds of software packages for development, IDEs, and editors.

Editors are usually developed for sighted people in mind, since they make up the majority of programmers out there, but among the blind there are many programmers, a much higher than average number than that of sighted community and programmers in the sighted community.

We use braille, and screen readers to access the computer. Our technologies are limited by what the program exposes by various accessibility events, and reading the screen draws.

I want to develop an editor for now, maybe someday an IDE, but for now an editor.

I want to have syntax detection, I don’t call it syntax coloring as I will want the information instead of shown in a specified color, it might be indicated via speech or braille to the respective access technology, which I will refer to as Acc.T in the future of this email.

I started by playing with Scintilla’s implementation for WxPython, but I am not sure that I can get at all of the underpinnings that I need to work with.

So, Is there a wx text control that will start at the very basic level, and provide me with raw data?

I don’t mind getting my hands dirty and developing up the control. Or would I be better rolling a brand new widget for this?

Thanks for any ideas or suggestions.

2

I can't tell what you mean by this. Can you describe the user experience as if a magic genie suddenly made this appear? Let's say you have a Python source file with

    def func( param ):
        # This is a comment
        return param + "string"

In that snippet, we have keywords, comments, operators, and a literal string, each of which is rendered in a different color in a syntax-aware editor. How would this be rendered in your editor? As an example, I would think it would be annoying to have the reader say "keyword def symbol func open parentheses symbol param close parentheses colon, comment This is a comment", and so on, but of course I don't have your perspective.

···

On Apr 14, 2018, at 10:28 PM, juanhernandez98@gmail.com wrote:

I want to have syntax detection, I don’t call it syntax coloring as I will want the information instead of shown in a specified color, it might be indicated via speech or braille to the respective access technology, which I will refer to as Acc.T in the future of this email.

—
Tim Roberts, timr@probo.com
Providenza & Boekelheide, Inc.

3

Well, this could be configurable, but I’m thinking for the syntax detection, of it being more useful in braille. Braille displays have special status chars, and I can use them to ilndicate this information under the text of the code.

But its getting to a point of how I can get that information to the screen reader. One of my ideas is when you run a python script and there are errors, I could show the person via this syntax detection where the error in their code is. By some kind of speech/braille notification.

···

From: wxpython-users@googlegroups.com wxpython-users@googlegroups.com On Behalf Of Tim Roberts
Sent: Saturday, April 14, 2018 11:16 PM
To: wxpython-users@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: [wxPython-users] development of a development editor

On Apr 14, 2018, at 10:28 PM, juanhernandez98@gmail.com wrote:

I want to have syntax detection, I don’t call it syntax coloring as I will want the information instead of shown in a specified color, it might be indicated via speech or braille to the respective access technology, which I will refer to as Acc.T in the future of this email.

I can’t tell what you mean by this. Can you describe the user experience as if a magic genie suddenly made this appear? Let’s say you have a Python source file with

def func( param ):

This is a comment

return param + “string”

In that snippet, we have keywords, comments, operators, and a literal string, each of which is rendered in a different color in a syntax-aware editor. How would this be rendered in your editor? As an example, I would think it would be annoying to have the reader say “keyword def symbol func open parentheses symbol param close parentheses colon, comment This is a comment”, and so on, but of course I don’t have your perspective.

—

Tim Roberts, timr@probo.com
Providenza & Boekelheide, Inc.

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4

Juan,

   Are you aware of emacspeaks? The url is http://emacspeak.sourceforge.net/.
The first two paragraphs explain its purpose:

"Emacspeak Inc announces immediate world-wide availability of Emacspeak 47.0
(AKA GentleDog) --a powerful audio desktop for leveraging today's evolving
semantic and Assistive Internet Cloud."

"Emacspeak is a speech interface that allows visually impaired users to
interact independently and efficiently with the computer. Audio formatting
--a technique pioneered by AsTeR-- and full support for W3C's Aural CSS
(ACSS) allows Emacspeak to produce rich aural presentations of electronic
information. By seamlessly blending all aspects of the Internet such as
Web-surfing and messaging, Emacspeak speech-enables local and remote
information via a consistent and well-integrated user interface. Available
free of cost on the Internet, Emacspeak has dramatically changed how the
author and thousands of blind and visually impaired users around the world
interact with the personal computer and the Internet. A rich suite of
task-oriented tools provides efficient speech-enabled access to the audio
desktop and evolving semantic WWW. When combined with Linux running on
low-cost PC hardware, Emacspeak/Linux provides a reliable, stable
speech-friendly solution that opens up the Internet to visually impaired
users around the world."

The company does not write explicitly that it works as an editor for the
visually impaired, but because emacs is a complete editor supporting many
programming language syntax it might do what you need.

Regards,

Rich

···

On Sat, 14 Apr 2018, juanhernandez98@gmail.com wrote:

I want to develop an editor for now, maybe someday an IDE, but for now an
editor.

5

my first thought is that wxPython, and Scintilla in general, is so visual in nature, that I’m not sure I’d use it as a starting point at all.

You may want to write something from scratch.

The parsing and syntax detection IS something you may want to re-use. I"d look at various editors written in Python for that code – maybe the one that used to ship with wxPython (does is still? sorry I’m forgetting the name)

-Good luck!

···

On Sun, Apr 15, 2018 at 5:47 AM, Rich Shepard rshepard@appl-ecosys.com wrote:

I want to develop an editor for now, maybe someday an IDE, but for now an

editor.
On Sat, 14 Apr 2018, juanhernandez98@gmail.com wrote:

Juan,

Are you aware of emacspeaks? The url is http://emacspeak.sourceforge.net/.

The first two paragraphs explain its purpose:

"Emacspeak Inc announces immediate world-wide availability of Emacspeak 47.0

(AKA GentleDog) --a powerful audio desktop for leveraging today’s evolving

semantic and Assistive Internet Cloud."

"Emacspeak is a speech interface that allows visually impaired users to

interact independently and efficiently with the computer. Audio formatting

–a technique pioneered by AsTeR-- and full support for W3C’s Aural CSS

(ACSS) allows Emacspeak to produce rich aural presentations of electronic

information. By seamlessly blending all aspects of the Internet such as

Web-surfing and messaging, Emacspeak speech-enables local and remote

information via a consistent and well-integrated user interface. Available

free of cost on the Internet, Emacspeak has dramatically changed how the

author and thousands of blind and visually impaired users around the world

interact with the personal computer and the Internet. A rich suite of

task-oriented tools provides efficient speech-enabled access to the audio

desktop and evolving semantic WWW. When combined with Linux running on

low-cost PC hardware, Emacspeak/Linux provides a reliable, stable

speech-friendly solution that opens up the Internet to visually impaired

users around the world."

The company does not write explicitly that it works as an editor for the

visually impaired, but because emacs is a complete editor supporting many

programming language syntax it might do what you need.

Regards,

Rich

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