Re: existing contract for working in Evince a11y

[Juanjo Marin <juanjomarin96 yahoo es>]

On Wed, 2010-04-07 at 12:01 +0200, Carlos Garcia Campos wrote:
> Excerpts from Lorenzo Gil Sanchez's message of mié abr 07 00:10:11 +0200 2010:
> > Hi all,
> > 
> > as some of you already know[1] we [2] have been hired by Consortium
> > Fernando de los Rios for the Knowledge and Information Society,
> > supported by the Regional Government of Andalusia in Spain [3], for
> > improving Evince accesibility [4].
> > 
> > It is our primary goal to collaborate as much as possible with upstream
> > and so, we really want our patches to be included in Evince and Poppler.
> > In order to accomplish this we are going to use standard GNOME practices
> > for communication such as these mailing lists, bugzilla comments and
> > patches and irc channels.  We'd like to work in the openess from the
> > very beginning, sharing our ideas and experience to get feedback and
> > knowledge from the community.
> > 
> > We know a few people have tried to work on this task in the past just by
> > looking at bug 309015. Recently Sam, Javed and Juanjo already expressed
> > their interest on it. We really want to avoid duplicating efforts so we
> > better all say what parts are we working on.
> > 
> > Now for some technical details:
> > 
> > We are going to implement the AtkText interface in the EvView widget. In
> > order to do so we are going to need to change poppler a bit so it can
> > pass the necessary text layout information to Evince and not just pixel
> > information. Does this comment[5] on bug 309015 still makes sense?:
> > 
> > "Nicolay and he suggested me three steps to follow:
> > 
> > 1) Replace poppler_page, poppler_selection and poppler_link with a single
> > poppler_markup that should contain a) letters combined in words b) their
> > coordinates c) links if required
> > 
> > 2) use this poppler_markup to implement AtkText
> > 
> > 3) use it in rendering selections and in text search"
> > 
> > Do you guys think it is a good starting point?
> 
> Yes, although I would leave current selection rendering and text
> search unmodified at the moment. In order to implement AtkText we need
> the text map of the page from poppler (the list of words, characters,
> bounding boxes, etc.). That's already implemented by poppler in
> TextOutputDev, but not exposed by the glib bindings, so I would start
> adding new API to the glib bindings for that.


I wonder how the text selection (the TextOutputDev that Carlos mentions
on the previous) can be affected by José Aliste work on the tile-based
rendering.


regards,

  -- Juanjo Marin