Re: Yelp and the Future

[Mark McLoughlin <markmc redhat com>]

Hi,

On Mon, 2005-02-07 at 05:59 -0600, Shaun McCance wrote:
> The a11y problems we currently have with Geckofied Yelp are pretty much
> a showstopper for anybody that needs assistive technologies to read or
> activate widgets for them.  While not nearly as bad as we had at first
> thought, it's certainly not good.
> 
> The current status is that a11y tools can read the contents of the page,
> but they can't see or activate links.  That would be like being able to
> see all the menu items in an application, but not being able to click on
> any of them.
> 
> I have no intention of trying to re-implement gtkhtml2 on HEAD for 2.10.
> There were just too many features added that rely on interactions with
> the rendering widget, and I don't even know how to implement most of
> them with gtkhtml2.
> 
> Given our a11y requirements, it looks like I'll have to sit out another
> release cycle.

	FWIW, I don't think that this should be an indefinite blocker. As
important as a11y is, it shouldn't be allowed to block important feature
work indefinetly. There really needs to be some give and take.

	Since Mozilla being inaccessible seems to be relatively fine with the
a11y community (since lynx etc. are accessible through accessible
terminals), perhaps a simple command line version of yelp which
pre-generates the html and runs lynx would be sufficient accessibility
support for the Geckofied yelp?

> This brings up a question of policy.  Without Yelp 2.10, there's no hard
> run-time dependancy for gnome-doc-utils, but Bug Buddy is already using
> the build utilities from gnome-doc-utils.  This requires gnome-doc-utils
> to be present to build Bug Buddy, even from tarballs.  While the .make
> file is included in the tarball, some of the stylesheets are needed to
> build the OMF files.
> 
> As I see it, we have three options:
> 
> 1) Make gnome-doc-utils a dependancy anyway.  This would just be a build
> dependancy, and wouldn't affect binary packages.

	I don't see the problem with that ...

Cheers,
Mark.