Tod Creasey's Eclipse Blog

I have been asked a few times now about how accessibility should be tested using Eclipse. The Eclipse team is testing using the following parameters:

Windows XP High Contrast
1152x768 Display

If we don't scale right for you with this settings please log us a bug.

Eclipse 3.1 is going to support bidirectional languages (those that can type right to left as well as left to right such as Arabic). This means that for a lot of Eclipse applications you are going to want to provide alternative icons to those you ship (mostly those with a horizontal arrow or something like that).

First step is nl'ing your icon lookup. The Platform does this internally in a bunch of places by creating a URL and using the Runtime API to look it up. The secret is the $nl$ in your path - that tells the runtime to look in fragments as well.

Here is an example

String iconPath = "$nl$/icons/myicon.gif";

URL url = Platform.find( Platform.getBundle(MyPluginId), new Path(iconPath));

Image Descriptor descriptor = ImageDescriptor.createFromURL(url);

If you want to dig around more have a look at org.eclipse.ui.internal.util.BundleUtility to see how we do it.

If the icon reference is in your plugin.xml just make sure you have the $nl$ prefix on your path. We will handle this for you (and log us a bug if not!). Just make sure if you create your own extension point that it loads ImageDescriptors this way.

Second step is creating a fragment - icons are done the same way as message catalogs so no rocket science there.

Finally test it. You can switch orientation using the -dir rtl command line option or by specifying a bidirectional language using the -nl option (iw (Hebrew), ar (Arabic), fa (Farsi) or ur (Urdu)). Note we don't do this for free as a lot of users in these locales still want the left to right look.

Welcome to my Eclipse Blog. I am going to post random snippets of info here as I come across them in my daily work on the Eclipse UI team.