An important milestone happened on Friday, February 26: Mono Accessibility 2.0 was released. It’s important because all applications running on Moonlight 2.0, or greater, will be accessible from now on.

Accessibility?

If you are not familiar with this word, Accessibility, it might mean nothing to you and, probably, you will need a more formal definition:

“Accessibility is a general term used to describe the degree to which a product, device, service, or environment is accessible by as many people as possible. Accessibility can be viewed as the ability to access and possible benefit of some system or entity. Accessibility is often used to focus on people with disabilities and their right of access to entities, often through use of assistive technology.” Wikipedia

You have interacted with Accessibility in real life, even if this is your first time reading this word. Have you seen those tiny bumps on the floor when taking the subway? Wheelchairs ramps or the dots on elevator buttons? Have you heard that noise, like beeping, when crossing the street? Have you noticed the audio jack in some ATMs?

These are real life examples of Accessibility. Accessibility in software is similar, it’s basically the degree of interaction between your software and people with temporal or permanent disabilities. People who can only use the keyboard or the mouse, people with low vision, blind people or people with hearing disabilities. All of them will be able to interact and use your application only if it’s accessible. That’s why Accessibility is important.

Accessibility and Moonlight

Microsoft Silverlight is web application framework for building media experiences and rich interactive applications for the Web. Moonlight is an open source implementation of Silverlight. Besides providing a rich experience for the web, applications running on Moonlight are now available for people with disabilities, allowing them to interact and use these applications. The interaction between these new applications and existent Accessibility Technologies (ATs), such as screen readers, is the same. All existent ATs are reused, it’s like interacting with any other desktop application. ATs in GNOME should work right now without any change and, if any change is required, it will help to provide a better integration with this framework.

Implementation

Refer to Accessibility Architecture for a detailed explanation of the complete architecture.

In both Accessibility implementations, Silverlight and Moonlight, Microsoft UI Automation is used for interacting and exposing data of UI elements of the application. These data are used by ATs to access and manipulate those UI elements. Properties such as visibility, sensitivity or interaction, are exposed by Automation Peers (also known as Automation Providers), along with Automation Patterns to indicate the type of interaction in the control, for example: accepting selection or allowing clicking. There’s always a relation one to one, one Automation Peer and one Control. The properties are available to ATs through the information exposed by the UIA/Atk Bridge module. This module is loaded by the Moonlight application to interact with ATs. It keeps a tree of Atk objects to represent every UI Automation element in the Moonlight application.

The interaction between ATs and Moonlight applications is like this:

1. An AT requests information about the Moonlight control in Firefox.
2. Firefox asks Moonlight this information.
3. Moonlight uses the A11yHelper to load the UIA/Atk bridge module and returns the root accessible, it represents the control’s Automation Peer: WindowAutomationPeer.
4. From now on, new AutomationPeers will be mapped, one-to-one, to an Atk.Object. All data requested by an AT will be accessed through the associated Atk.Object, and this one will return information contained in the AutomationPeer.

If you are curious you can checkout the sources to see the final implementation:

• Moonlight: important bits located in class/System.Windows/System.Windows.Automation.Peers/ and class/System.Windows/Mono/A11yHelper.cs.
• Moonlight UIA/Atk Bridge: implementation located in MoonAtkBridge/.

How do I install it?

Before installing, make sure Assistive Technologies is enabled, then add the Mono UIA repository (see Downloading) and follow the instructions (taken from Installing):

1. Install the updated xulrunner package from the above repositories. (This is required until Firefox 3.7 because of bug #480317)
2. Install Novell Moonlight with Accessibility Support for 32 bit or 64 bit.
3. Install Novell Moonlight Accessibility Extensions
4. Restart Firefox
5. Enjoy!

Useful links

• Accessibility. Windows Developer Center
• Silverlight: Accessibility Overview
• GNOME Accessibility
• Mono Accessibility 2.0 unleashed!

Yes! Your favorite task management application is back. Tasque v0.1.9 was released today!. New features include:

• Support for Mono >= 2.6
• Customizable color highlighting in tasks.
• Hiveminder improvements
• New translations
• And more!

See the announce email to get more information.

Get it while it’s hot!

Screenshots?

More here!

Where to get?

• Main Downloads page
• Sources
• Mac OS X binaries
• MS Windows binaries

More information?

• Wiki
• FAQs

By Claire L. Evans / CC BY-ND 2.0

This is an updated version of Multiple Parallel Mono Environments.

What is Pulque?

Pulque is a collection of applications written in Ruby and Bash scripting to maintain parallel development environments.

Why does Pulque exist?

Three reasons:

1. I need to keep multiple versions installed of the same software,
2. I need to know what Version Control System is used by the software, and the most important
3. I want to keep myself sane.

At work, I have to interact with different open source projects, most of them use Subversion and Git, but some others use Bazaar and Mercurial. Keeping track of the current parallel development environment and the VCS used by the software is exhausting.

You spend time focusing on something that shouldn’t be that important:

• Managing your parallel environments and,
• Keeping track of the VCS used by the software

Is easy to get confused when interacting with the repository, for example, executing svn update when the software is stored in a git repository. Is silly, but it happens. Unless you are using an IDE that support Multiple Parallel Development Environments you will need the terminal to configure and build your projects.

Pulque helps you maintaining parallel development environments by:

• Printing in the bash prompt the name of the parallel development environment and the type of the VCS, this information is updated depending on the working directory,
• Defining aliases to the default commands used to configure and build the software project, to always prefix your projects using your parallel environment, and
• Showing a failure or success alert when the command finishes.

Installing and using Pulque

Follow the instructions in INSTALL, or if you are using openSUSE 11.2:

Click here to drink Pulque!

Don’t forget to add the function pswitch to your .bashrc. Bash will autocomplete your environment name when using TAB TAB.

function pswitch {
  source /usr/bin/__pswitch $1
}

Read the USING file to understand how to use Pulque in the daily basis. If you find something weird or interesting please create an issue to fix it.

Colophon

According to Wikipedia: “Pulque, or octli, is a milk-colored, somewhat viscous alcoholic beverage made from the fermented sap of the maguey plant, and is a traditional native beverage of Mexico.“

A couple of days ago I finished reading: The Ruby Programming Language, book written by David Flanagan and Yukihiro Matsumoto. If I have to say anything about the book and, the language, of course, is: I am impressed. The syntax is pretty for writing and simple for reading. Its simplicity makes you understand the code, is like visualizing the goal of the program in your mind by reading it, not running it. It is like reading a well written letter. You just understand.

I must say, when I was reading the book, at the beginning. I did not feel comfortable with the weird, at that time, syntax. Method decorations such as “!” and “?”, and the support for methods aliases made no sense. Actually I thought I was wasting my time by trying to learn the language. I was wrong.

When I learned C++ several years ago, I did not have reference to object orientation or any object-oriented programming language. Learning it was difficult, but, at the same time, easy. Difficult because I did not know the paradigm, easy because it was my first time learning that kind of syntax. After learning C++ I decided to learn Java and after that, I decided to learn C#.

And I learned them all the same way. I “translated” the syntax. Translated it from the “new language” to the “old language”. I did learn them all. And I thought, for long time, that the rule was: “Learn all the languages the same way: by translation”. I was wrong. Again.

Learning a new programming language, in my opinion, is better when you do not translate the new language. Similar to learn to speak a new language. In both cases, you have to think in the language. I decided to think in the new language. To do it that way. The Ruby way. The results were amazing. Were so amazing that inspired me to write a project in Ruby. I wanted to try out the syntax, the platform and the community. To see if the language was that good as I thought.

After trying it out. No disappointments at all. Actually is interesting that C# and Ruby share a lot of things, syntactically speaking. Both of them are pretty languages. Probably they do not share goals. However, I’m sure they share one goal: to make the life of the software developer easier. And, to a software developer, a programming language, and everything around it, that makes your life easier is what matters the most.