This Week in GNOME and Other GNOME Development News
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This Week in GNOME ☛ This Week in GNOME/Felix Häcker: #126 New Apps
Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from December 08 to December 15.
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GNOME ☛ Martín Abente Lahaye: [teaser] Gameeky: A new learning tool to develop STEAM skills
Preface
Twenty three years ago a magazine I read featured tools for modding popular video games I had spent hundreds of hours playing.
That article triggered a chain of events that would soon lead me into learning how to speak English, collaborate with people on the internet and, eventually, pursue a career in computer science and open source.
Since then, It became important for me to replicate pieces of that experience for the younger. Not because I wanted everyone to become a software developer, but because I wanted everyone to experience that genuine satisfaction of learning new things while enjoying it.
A problem of exposition
It’s no surprise that video games are often studied and applied in Education. It’s hard to find a better medium that mixes art, math, technology and other STEAM fields.
Although there are plenty of tools out there, those that can take a learner all the way from a consumer of a medium to a creator, are rare. There are great low-floor tools but, only a few make attempts to transition the learner into more powerful paradigms and there are great high-ceiling tools but they often are prohibitively complex.
It’s not a common realization that professional game development tools are designed for creating games efficiently and justifiably are not designed for a comprehensive learning experience for the young.
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Lukáš Tyrychtr: Down and down, exploring the implementation of the accessibility subsystem
Normally, a visually impaired user never encounters the implementation details of the pieces which allow a screen reader to know about accessibility related events and objects. Even a developer writing, say, a GTK application, does not need to care. Actually, even Firefox and Chromium developers are just using the ATK library.
Of course, when you are writing a screen reader, you begin to care a little, but you will be most likely using the AT-SPI2 library, which abstracts all the communication and related details, so you have only your trees of accessibility objects, and, yes, the events, which start to be a little bit rough, because they start looking like the low-level ones.
But, for all the curious readers, let’s look what lies below these layers.