Dear core developers of Reactos,
I would like to inform YOu about
my findings related to screen readers support while using Wine emulator, because
as i understood, Wine and Reactos are sharing crucial information to make those
tools as much Windows compatible as it is possible.
1. NVDA is not able to run in
The Wine, which can be downloaded from PCLINUXOSS repositories, NVDA is only
plaing a welcome gong and then i Am receiving series of error messages, one
related to winmm.dll and also other related to MSAA support. oleacc.dll very
probably.
When i tried one Czech very
little screen reader based on using API hooks and API calls, program is written
by using Microsoft Visual Basic 6.0 professional edition and crucial helper dlls
are written in Microsoft visual C++ but not Express 2005 edition, older
release of this programming language has been used.
What are mi findings?
Algorithms used for generating synthesizet speech
are working ammazingly in Wine. but other algorithms for fetching names of
buttons, objects and for getting textual information are not
working.
But i Am afraid, that implementing reliable MSAA
support is so much complex for core developers of Wine or Reactos, that it will
never been possible to reach this goal.
Many of us are very intelligent and professional
developers, who are even able to use Assembler while compiling and developing
Reactos core components, but i think, that without access to Windows MSAA source
code developing reliable MSAA support will be only big dream, which would never
been come true.
Reactos is in general very
stable and reliable operating system and i believe, that in future, also many
device drivers will work with Reactos.
If also MSAA support would be added in future, this
would be very positive for many handicapped users, because MSAA is being used
not only by screen readers, but also while using other assistive technology,
which are based on MSAA calls.
BUt i think, that Microsoft will not want to reveal
The MSAA source code, the modified source code of oleacc.dll, user32.dll and
others. Accessing source code is fortunately possible, but i read about this,
that some fee must be paied to Microsoft to get access to their source code
repository, and i think, that there will be very restricted
conditions.