Winboard 4.8 accessible version

[grzezlo]

Hi.
I'm a blind programmer, somewhat interested in chess playing, so thanks to all contributors for accessible winboard...
I'd like to upgrade old 4.5.2 accessible version, to current 4.8.0...
I downloaded WB source tree from Savannah, upgraded the jaws.c module and makefile in master including there updates from v4.5.x branch (NVDA support).
I updated PieceToName and PieceTypeName arrays, so they reflect the ChessSquare from common.h.
Is correct upgrading call to GenLegal by setting fifth parameter to EmptySquare?
Also I'm not sure about setting 6th parameter of HasPromotionChoice to appData.sweepSelect...
After this modifications, everything compiles nice (under MSVC), and seems to work correctly.
My question, should something more be done about this upgrade?
If not, would it be possible to incorporate the modifications into the official git repo, and generate official WB 4.8.0 accessible variant?
By the way, I'd like to discuss some minor improvements with other users of talking version, and possibly incorporate it too...
One more thing - Polish language: I'm a bit confused, because of the po folder (and pl.po, nearly complete), and independently the .lng files (without polish), and script converting lng2po.sh, which suggests that .po is a new "standard", and .lng is older one... But even winboard4.8 uses lng files, so my question, what should I do to provide full Polish language into winboard, also in accessible variant (so including translations of "jaws.c" messages)?

[H.G.Muller]

Sorry for the tardy response. My wife is hospitalized with a broken leg, so for the time being I spend most of my time in the hospital, without internet access.

And yes, you are right; it is high time to update the JAWS patch. When the emergency here has subsided, I will work on it.

As to your question about internationalization: the .po files are for XBoard, the .lng files are for WinBoard. They use separate systems: XBoard uses GNU gettext, which is also integrated in the GUI libraries it uses (Xaw or GTK). The WinBoard front-end would ignore it however. And most of the texts are actually displayed by the front-end, and thus not necessarily the same in WinBoard and XBoard (although I tried to converge them where possible).

So WinBoard needed a completely different system for internationalizing the menu and dialog texts (which are not in C code, but in a Windows resource (.rc) file). So I basically designed my own system for that, based on the .lng files. And WinBoard users from various countries were friendly enough to make the translations (plus that there already existed some dedicated translated versions of WinBoard, from which I could rip out the translations and convert them to .lng files).

Only later gettext was made to work in XBoard, but needed .po files. Hence I created the lng2po.sh script, so that the existing WinBoard translations could be used to supply as many as the translations for XBoard as possible. All texts generated from the back-end, which is shared between XBoard and WinBoard and consists mostly of error messages, could of course be used directly, and many menu items and dialog texts were similar enough that I could use the WinBoard translations also for XBoard.)

GNU has its own translation teams, however, which work on gettext-based GNU software. This is where the Polish translation has come from. This is something that pretty much happens entirely without my knowledge; sometimes the xboard-devel mailing list gets an e-mail from a 'translation bot'to inform us that a new .po file is available, and then we add it to the source tree. Unfortunately I never made a script to convert .po to .lng. (Which for a long time would not have been very helpful anyway, as WinBoard had far more texts than XBoard. But this gap has been closed by now.) For a single language it would probably be faster to make the translation by hand than to create the script; because of differences in the English messages the script isn't really trivial.

[grzezlo]

Hi and first of all, best wishes of health for your wife and you...
Thanks for your message...
About the upgrade: as I mentioned, I have talking 4.8 version, which I improved further (e.g. in Flip view mode, arrow keys works as they should so down arrows moves up and up arrow moves down the chessboard row coordinates...).

I could generate a diff file, and send it to you, so the upgrade process would take less of your time, there is no need of doubling work, and I hope that reviewing my modifications and correcting them where needed would be simpler.
There is also a problem with NVDA and braille: speaking message using speakText does what it says - just speaks, and it would be nice to call in pararel the BrailleMessage function (which could be of some use for blind people with hearing impairment).
Having NVDA and braille display, I can easily do needed modification and test it...
Unfortunately, I don't use Jaws, so don't know if in JFW speaking text also sends it to braille display, but it seems that jfwapi.dll hasn't different function for displaying text in braille, so it probably works...
There is also a minor problem, that during computer thinking synthesizer sometimes says "blank blank blank blank", it seems that some empty strings are spoken, but it's also trivial to fix...

Thank you for thorough explanations regarding translation process. I'll try to translate the file by hand.
I hope that there is some method to auto-merge the new messages into existing lng file (changelog says that language.txt was generated about 2011, so possibly some new strings appeared, most probably the new piece names in jaws.c...).
Greetings, Greg.

[Dave Acevedo]

Best Regards to you and your wife Harm.