Re: Evince 0.3.2

[Jonathan Blandford <jrb redhat com>]

Janina Sajka <janina rednote net> writes:

> Marco Pesenti Gritti writes:
> > ... ... ... The goal of evince is to replace the multiple document viewers 
> > that exist on the GNOME Desktop, like ggv, gpdf, and xpdf with a 
> > single simple application.
> 
> 
> So, if the goal is to replace, please tell us where you're at in terms
> of supporting accessibility for persons who don't look at video screens?
> Do you support alternative rendrings via AT-SPI, for example? If not
> yet, when can we expect something like that?

Hi Janina,

I'd love to make evince accessible, and it's definitely on our roadmap.
There are some technical changes in poppler and evince that need to
happen before we can do so, but we're much significantly closer to being
able to do this than when we started.

This is on my personal feature list, but I'm pretty busy nowadays, and I
have a few features I need to get done first.  As always in Free
Software, if someone else wants to pick this up it will happen much
faster.  If you know anyone capable and interested in writing this, send
them to me.  We've got enough stuff done that they wouldn't have to be
sighted.

Some issues:

 * Evince supports several backends, such as tiff, postscript, djvu as
   well as pdf.  I really don't see us getting full accessibility for
   any format other than pdf anytime.  Tiff and djvu are giant image
   formats, and postscript might as well be.  Maybe we can do something
   fancy with OCR, but that's outside the scope of this project ATM.

 * We currently don't have a caret in evince.  We could add one for the
   atk interface, but I'm not 100% sure how this would work.  I suppose
   we could add something like the F7 mode that epiphany has, but I've
   never looked too closely at this problem.

 * Between ATK's text interface being limited, and PDF's minimal
   semantic information, I don't see us doing much more than raw text
   and links.  That's fine for now, but be aware that doing better is
   going to take some effort.

Thanks,
-Jonathan