Re: Proposed external dependency: WebKit/GTK+

[Willie Walker <William Walker Sun COM>]

Hi Alp:

> I'm not sure what you think is being underestimated here. Instead of
> throwing our hands in the air and despairing at the size of the task,
> my company (Nuanti Ltd.) and I made the decision to make WebKit GTK+
> accessibility happen early in 2008.

I'm certainly not throwing my hands up in despair -- from the work with
Gecko, we know it is a solvable problem.  Instead, I'm really trying to
make sure people understand the scope of the problem.  At the same time,
note also that I appreciate the work you are doing with WebKit a11y.  It
is very important.

It took a very long time to get accessibility support added to Gecko,
and it involved a lot of collaborative work between the assistive
technology and Gecko developers.  There is a *lot* of testing that needs
to be done to make sure the implementation really is doing the right
thing.

Joanie Diggs took a look at your a11y patches this summer and also went
over them with the WebKit folks that were at GNOME Boston.  She also
demonstrated the use of Accerciser to the WebKit folks who attended
GNOME Boston 2008.  As such, face-to-face testing and feedback has taken
place.  I'm sorry it wasn't been recorded in the bug database :-(, but
it did take place and it involved WebKit folks.

I fear we may have had some severe communication breakdown.  Over the
summer, I sent several messages that had your e-mail (alp at webkit dot
org) on them and with WebKit in the subject line.  In at least one of
those messages, I also made it very clear that my assumption was that
the ball was in your court.  Those unfortunately went unanswered and I
assumed that you had just lost interest or ran out of time.  Had we had
better communication over the summer, I'm sure I probably would have
learned you were tracking the work in the WebKit bug database and I
would have subscribed to it.

I was just now able to find the WebKit bug database.  I have created a
new account and have added myself to the CC list of
https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=21546.  Joanie has done the
same.

> The basics are already here and first class web accessibility is
> around the corner. It will happen sooner if we work together.

This is great, and again, your work is appreciated.  Hopefully all we
have really had here is a very unfortunate breakdown of communication.

> Let me know if you will have the time to study the current state of
> the ATK and caret navigation patches (the ones in the bug tracker are
> a couple of weeks old) and we can start working together today and get
> this synced up to WebKit SVN within the week!

I will try to set aside some time each day in the coming weeks to take a
look.  The main things I'll look for initially are the ability to get to
the accessible content, the caret navigation, and the delivery of caret
movement events.

Thanks Alp!

Will