[g-a-devel]Re: Bug 89336

[Calum Benson <calum benson sun com>]

On Thu, 2002-10-17 at 09:48, Michael Meeks wrote:

> 	I spent _days_ trying to get Bonobo to be 'accessible', and allow the
> toolbars to be reached by the keyboard. It seems that this was just so
> much wasted time - so I'm extremely pissed off about it.
> 
> 	Worse - AFAIR it was extremely difficult to try and persuade Gtk+ to
> allow me to conditionally focus widgets - hence the
> sucking_gtk_keybindings mess - the widgets only entering the focus chain
> when <Control> is held down and all manner of other mess. Similarly
> hooking into whatever mechanism Gtk+ uses to do Menu focusing looked
> extremely hard when I poked - simply because Gtk+ uses it's own
> privileged internals in a way Bonobo can't.

If it's really going to be hard to modify the keyboard accessiblity of
bonobo toolbars so much, now is the time to discuss what might be a
better solution, both from a user's and an implementation viewpoint,
before toolbars are made accessible in gtk too.

When I mentioned it to him again the other day, Bill seemed to have some
reservations about the proposed new keynav scheme anyway (F10 cycling
between all available menubars and toolbars), so it may be that we could
keep F10 for cycling between menubars and Ctrl+F-something-else for
cycling between toolbars, for example.  (But I really don't think we can
keep Ctrl+F10 for this, it's developed too much of an alternative
meaning now).

> 	In short - I'm horribly annoyed about it; and I've lost interest ;-) if
> you can fix it - please do so, I'd love a patch cleaning that rubbish
> out. Is toolbar a11y officially a lost cause ? does Gtk+ do it ? etc. My
> instinct is to rip all that code out - but I havn't had time yet.

I understand your annoyance, but toolbar a11y is not at all a lost
cause, it will happen in gtk soon.  We only let Owen off the hook last
time around because any well-written app shouldn't have functions that
are only available on a toolbar :)

Cheeri,
Calum.

-- 
CALUM BENSON, Usability Engineer       Sun Microsystems Ireland
mailto:calum benson sun com            GNOME Desktop Group
http://ie.sun.com                      +353 1 819 9771

Any opinions are personal and not necessarily those of Sun Microsystems