Re: Proposed external dependency: WebKit/GTK+

["Alp Toker" <alp atoker com>]

2008/11/7 Willie Walker <William Walker sun com>:
> 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.

I appreciate the impressive amount of work that has gone into Mozilla
in that court. We stand on the shoulders of those giants wherever we
use ATK's web-oriented capabilities and the ecosystem built around
them.

>
>> 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.

It sounds that way. I'm excited to see your positive response and
think good things will happen in very short order.

>
>> 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.

Vincent has already offered to act as a go-between if communication
breaks down but it sounds like we'll be working closely anyway if you
can put aside that time. So, let's get some solid action items here:

1) Get caret navigation looked at and landed.
1.b) Add back support to Yelp and Epiphany (only a few lines of code).
1.c) Consider binding it to F7 via a configurable GtkBinding so all
WebKit-based GTK+ applications can inherit caret navigation support
without modification.

2) Get ATK looked at. See how many of the remaining issues listed in
WebKit bug #21546 can be fixed rapidly now that we have feedback from
the accessibility team (the DOM events like caret location and text
node issues in particular), punting on the more difficult ones so we
don't slip.

3) Ensure that GIMP, Yelp, Devhelp, Empathy and Conduit (and
notification-daemon if they've merged the WebKit patch?) have _zero_
regressions in accessibility following (1) and (2).

4) Beyond next week: For Epiphany, assess what we need to do to to
better support HTML5 / ARIA.
4.a) Develop better communication channels with the Apple accessibility team.
4.b) Help Google adapt the sandbox technology in Chrome/Linux so they
don't have to fork WebKit/GTK+'s accessibility code any more and can
work with us directly.
4.c) I heard Sun is integrating WebKit into Java. Do you have the
internal Sun connections to find out if they can re-use our
accessibility in Java for Linux?