[oats-sig] new member of mailing list

On 25/09/2007, stephen emslie <stephenemslie at gmail.com> wrote:

Perhaps now is a good time for one of those introduction things going
around. My name is Stephen Emslie, and I'm a software developer
working with web technology and living in London. I met up with Simon
at the COGAIN (eye tracking) convention in Leicester recently, and he
told me about OATS.

I also got turned on to the idea of a gaze-driven switch there, which
(in a nutshell) would interpret eye movement and emulate a more
traditional head switch. This would be an attempt to make the most of
what we can get out of cheap off-the-shelf hardware and open source
software [1].

I've been looking for a way to get started on this stuff, and while I
think I could get a lot of mileage out of emulating existing switch
devices, an accessibility platform like Jambu is a really exiting
thing to keep in mind, and possibly use as a test framework as I'm
definitely going to be working in python.

It sounds like you have looked through this pretty thoroughly, but I
wonder if some of those recent developments might make development
with Python+XUL+SVG a bit less of a headache. SVG support is coming
along in gecko and I've noticed that PyXPCOM now lives in Mozilla
trunk and appears to be active. I like your idea of using both python
and javascript appropriately. Perhaps that is a way to approach the
sandboxing issues you mentioned?

It would be great to see a screenshot of Jambu in action.

Stephen

[1] http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/opengazer/

On 9/25/07, Steve Lee <steve at fullmeasure.co.uk> wrote:
> On 25/09/2007, stephen emslie <stephenemslie at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Jambu looks really interesting. I've been developing web applications
> > with python, open source tools and the web standards stack for a few
> > years so this sounds right up my alley.
>
> Hi, I could have done with your help earlier :-)
>
> > Does Jambu embed python with PyXPCOM? It would be great to see this
> > technology put into practice so soon after SVG and python have hit
> > mozilla!
>
> No. After early attempts to leverage the Mozilla Platform with Python
> and SVG I decided after discussion with Aaron (a11y lead at Mozilla)
> to abandon Mozilla. I had big problems with Python on XUL, both
> building and running. Though python access to the platform (pyXPCOM as
> you say) was easier to set up, I at that time thought I wanted python
> DOM access and scripting as well but Mark Hammond's work on that at
> Active State seemed to have frozen (i'm now not so sure I want that,
> partly due to concerns over sandbox security).
>
> Recent Mozilla developments with the renewed activity on XULRunner as
> a platform and ActiveState's commitment to open Sourcing parts of
> Komodo (XUL + python) make it much more attractive. I would still
> rather use a standard release of XUL rather than a custom build for
> reasons of support and testing.
>
> I'm using librsvg for SVG rendering and without SVG DOM have to
> provide simple dynamic rendering and events in my own model. That is a
> bit of a pain but does afford ultimate flexibility. I haven't ruled
> XUL out completely as a possible future direction. The inherent
> portability is very attractive.
>
> Another possibility would be to use both Python and Javascript as
> appropriate. I like Javascript, but its just that I *really* like
> python ;-).
>
> On another note I see Mark Finkle just announced his work on a
> Javascript version of ctypes that gives dynamic access to XPCOM. That
> should be very useful.
>
> --
> Steve Lee
> --
> Open Source Assistive Technology Software
> PowerTalk - your presentations can speak for themselves
> www.fullmeasure.co.uk
>
>