Re: [g-a-devel]Accessibility support in Glade

[Damon Chaplin <damon ximian com>]

On Mon, 2002-03-11 at 15:24, Bill Haneman wrote:

> >    The libglade parser seems to accept these, but it doesn't seem to
> >    keep the hierarchy. All the child properties/actions/relations seem
> >    to get folded into one list.
> 
> If I understand you correctly this is OK; the actions/relations are 
> attached to the hierarchy via API calls which the parser should make
> when processing <atkrelation> or <atkproperty
> name="AtkObject:accessible-parent">
> elements.  Maybe I am missing something in your question...
> 
> If the libglade parser sees an <atkaction> child of an <accessibility>
> child,
> it should associate the action with the AtkObject which the
> <accessibility>
> element refers to (i.e., to the widget's AtkObject).  I think the
> current libglade
> parsing code does this correctly at the moment, but I could be mistaken.

I can't see any libglade code to handle nested <accessibility> elements.

It only keeps one array of actions/relations/properties for each widget,
and adds them to the widget in glade_xml_add_accessibility_info().



> >  o The libglade parser seems to look for a translatable attribute on ATK
> >    properties. Should we add this to the DTD? The atkaction description
> >    should probably also have a translatable attribute.
> 
> name, description, and other string properties should be translatable, 
> except for "role".  Action descriptions should be translatable.

I've added a libglade bug about making action descriptions translatable:

http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=74412

We either move the description text to the contents of the atkaction tag
and mark it with a 'translatable' attribute, or we update intltool so it
copies the description attribute to the pot file.



> > ATK Relations
> > -------------
> > 
> >  o Is there a way of programmatically determining which relation types
> >    are relevant to which widgets?
> > 
> >    If not, is there a list of which types are relevant to which widgets?
> 
> No; but I don't think there is any harm in allowing them for all
> widgets; for instance I think most widget types could
> conceivably be used (or abused) as "labels".  Likewise
> it's only silly, but not dangerous, to refer to a GtkLabel as a 
> "controller" for another object.

My only concern is that it will confuse the user, as they won't know
which ones are really useful. (I don't know myself yet.)


> > Glade GUI
> > ---------
> > 
> > I think I'll add a new page to the property editor for a11y.
> > (I think I'll use an icon in the notebook tab as we don't have much room
> > for text, especially 'Accessibility'!.)
> 
> Then of course you will need to provide alt-text for the icon...
> and set atk_object_set_name () for the notebook tab.
>
> If you really only expose two properties, is there a danger of
> this page just being ignored all the time?  We want this to
> be as visible as possible without seriously compromising 
> glade's usability.

My original idea was to have an 'Accessibility' button at the bottom of
the 'Common' properties page. But I thought developers would ignore
that, so I decided to use a new property page instead.

If we did move 1 or 2 properties onto the other pages, we'd still have
the problem of developers ignoring the other a11y properties. And I
think it is better to keep all a11y properties together.

(By the way, do you have an a11y icon I can use for the notebook tab?)

Damon