Re: Metacity end of life

[Willie Walker <William Walker Sun COM>]

Hi All:

WOW. I'm impressed. I received a lot of replies about this from people 
wondering how they can help.  What a great community we have!

There are a number of different variables to take in consideration:

1) The existing metacity that ships with GNOME today.  It works fine 
and there's no need to continue investing in a11y support/maintenance 
for it (thanks, metacity maintainers, for your hard work!).

2) Mutter itself, which is a branch of metacity to add clutter-based 
compositing (as I understand it). One of the things needed here is 
testing to see if the GUI provides the same level of a11y support as the 
existing metacity shipping with GNOME. This includes testing keyboard 
traversal to switch between windows/panels/etc., testing with Accerciser 
to determine the same (or very similar) events are issued when one 
presses Alt+Tab, etc.  Note that the gnome-mag and composite issues are 
known and are being worked on via a potential "plug in" to GNOMEShell.

3) GNOMEShell (http://live.gnome.org/GnomeShell). This is currently a 
plugin for Mutter, and is likely to define a whole new way users 
interact with the desktop for GNOME 3.0. It seems an a11y evaluation 
(and perhaps recommendations) for keyboard traversal, theming, AT-SPI 
support, etc.

The base knowledge you will need for the above is likely to be:

* the ability to build/install/run components from source
* the ability to recover from screwing up your system while attempting
  the above
* a fundamental knowledge of GNOME keyboard commands
* knowledge of accerciser and the AT-SPI, though you can learn
  on the fly
* BONUS (and possible substitution for accerciser): knowledge of
  the GNOME accessibility support: AccessX, theming (e.g., high
  contrast large print inverse), GOK, Dasher, Orca, MouseTweaks,
  MouseTrap, etc.

When approaching new things like this, I tend to examine things from 
very coarse granularity down to finer granularity:

1) Can the user interact with it via the keyboard alone?
2) Does it honor theming?
3) Does it expose itself via the AT-SPI (can I see it in accerciser)?
4) Can I get to all the GUI components via accerciser?
5) Do the GUI components appear to present the right AT-SPI role and
   can I get to useful text, a name, a relation (e.g., labelled by),
   etc.?
6) Do the GUI components emit the expected events when I tab to them
   and/or activate them?  For example, do I get focus events?  Do I
   get state changed events?
7) At this point, we start tweaking things to make the app work
   nicer with assistive technologies.

So, some level of understanding where mutter stands with respect to 
accessibility would be helpful. The same goes for GNOMEShell.  In 
addition, a better understanding of the various toolkits that seem to be 
emerging on top of clutter would be useful.

As for where to place what we've learned, I would suggest working with 
the project teams themselves to get the accessibility info stored with 
the project (i.e., put it with the project's WIKI instead of solely on 
the accessibility WIKI).  By doing things that way, we will tend to 
isolate ourselves less and we will also continue to keep a11y at the 
fronts of the minds of mainstream developers.

Many many thanks again to all of those who raised their hands,

Will

On 08/12/09 10:23 AM, Willie Walker wrote:
>  From http://blogs.gnome.org/metacity/2009/07/06/the-future-of/
>
> "It’s fairly clear now that Mutter will be an alternative window manager
> in GNOME 2.28, and the only window manager in GNOME 3. It is therefore
> taking over the reins from Metacity 2: effectively, Mutter is Metacity 3."
>
> Translation: "There is work to do with respect to a11y." Is anyone out
> there able to jump in and help?
>
> Will
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