[LAD] Interface development for the blind (starting from Bristol)

[fons at kokkinizita.net]

On Fri, Apr 09, 2010 at 12:46:51AM +0200, Julien Claassen wrote:

>    Applications, which have both GUIs and CLIs are: Aeolus (restricted CLI, yet 
> helpful). But Fons relies - I seem to remember - on his own UI-classes. Still, 
> he makes use of callback functions, if I'm right.

It uses readline, and readline's history feature. 

In this case both the GUI and the TUI are plugins
and they have to use the same interface which for
Aeolus is fully event-driven - the user interface
is a separate thread that exchange messages with
the application, there are no synchronous calls
between the two.

One nasty problem which readline does not solve
is mixing program output and user input. When
the application prints something (which may be
not the result of user input but asynchronous)
you want the user's input line to remain intact
instead of being broken into pieces by the output.
This could be even more important in case the
interface is a single line Braille 'display'. 

I once had some nice code solving this, but it
was written for my then employer, and I can't
use it in open source projects.

Ciao,

-- 
FA

O tu, che porte, correndo si ?
E guerra e morte !