About clutter-gtk and his lack of accessibility support

[Piñeiro <apinheiro igalia com>]

Sorry for the cross-posting, but not sure about the best list to send this.

Background: AFAIK, clutter-gtk was always a proof of concept library. It
was not really used by any core module, and the plans towards Gtk4 with
respect to integrate gtk with clutter [1] basically announced his future
death. For that reason, although it was on in my personal TODO, I never
allocated too much time to fix the a11y aspects of that library. But, as
it is not clear when that gtk-clutter integration will happen, some
modules planned to use it towards GNOME 3.8. The poster boy there was
gnome-documents, so suddenly that item increased its priority. Taking
into account that there are just two weeks till freeze [2], my idea was
use any of my spare time on clutter-gtk a11y.

But today, talking with Cosimo, he mentioned that he dropped clutter-gtk
dependency, and that probably other modules will follow.

In case of someone wondering how much work adding a11y support on
clutter-gtk is, after some research and IRC chatting with Emmanuele, it
is doable but not trivial (anyway 3.8 is really near, so getting it
finished during these two weeks would be complex, probably it would be
postponed till 3.10).

But sincerely, I'm not sure if all this really worth any effort at all.
It is basically deprecated, recently dropped by some modules, and
probably will be dropped soon by others. I only can think on Boxes as a
module that doesn't have plans for that. And sincerely there are other
places to put our any kind of a11y developing effort.

In that sense, and looking to this problem from a different POV, one
could argue that as there are already reasons to not use clutter-gtk, we
could just say that "not having a11y support" is just another reason to
not use it, and that the a11y team do not plan to solve that aspect on
that support because clutter-gtk it is barely used.

Doubts, doubts everywhere. So, I'm writing this mail to ask the opinion
of others. Questions like, how relevant do you see clutter-gtk on the
GNOME short-medium term? How many maintainers of core-apps plans to use
it? Do someone thinks that using any kind of developing time on
clutter-gtk really worths?

BR

[1]
https://www.desktopsummit.org/program/sessions/gtk-4-future-your-favorite-toolkit
[2]
https://mail.gnome.org/archives/desktop-devel-list/2013-February/msg00024.html

-- 
Alejandro Piñeiro Iglesias