The GNOME desktop accessibility API has grown, and now has features not in the Java Accessibility API from which it was modeled. Specifically there are calls to obtain the start and end indicies of a range of text, in addition to the string itself (these are combined into the AccessibleTextSequence object) to supplement/replace the AccessibleText calls that only return the text strings. Assistive technologies need the indicies in order to better walk through large bodies of text (rather than doing string compares to figure out where they are in the text, which is ugly).

Please also see Bugzilla bug #171581 - http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=171581 - for more information. The "ugly string compares" are what is currently being used by the gnome-java-bridge (as a work-around), but that is a brittle and dangerous approach.

As we are already retrieving the text, it shouldn't be a significant amount of work to also return the indicies of the start/end of that text - we should have that information already in the code that implements the AccessibleText.getText[Before|After|At] calls in AccessibleJTextComponent.
###@###.### 2005-04-05 00:07:35 GMT