Re: Empathy accessibility

[Willie Walker <William Walker Sun COM>]

Hi Nolan:

I don't know the complete details of bug #545282, but you might take a 
look at the patch in the following bug to see if it might apply here:

http://defect.opensolaris.org/bz/show_bug.cgi?id=5914

Hope this helps,

Will

On Jan 20, 2009, at 3:22 PM, Nolan Darilek wrote:

> I've wanted to run Empathy for quite some time, especially as its 
> jingle
> support reportedly works and I'd hoped to use it as an alternative to
> skype. This seems to be the major accessibility showstopper, however:
>
> http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=545282
>
> In my brief tests, everything else seems to work.
>
> I've been engaged in some low-grade pestering of the Empathy 
> developers,
> especially as it is officially included in GNOME now and I'm a bit
> worried about this issue. Asking the developers about this produced a
> stock answer I seem to get again and again when I file AT bugs against
> other apps, "we don't know how accessibility works," so yesterday I 
> sent
> a link to the GNOME developers' accessibility guide, and today I 
> decided
> to look at the issue myself. I don't know too much C, and don't really
> know GLIB/GTK at all, so am not sure how effective I'll be, but I've
> really wanted to use Empathy for a while and figured it couldn't hurt 
> to
> check it out. So, questions:
>
> Has anyone taken a look at this? The developer I asked claimed that the
> bug wasn't on his end but was instead an issue with GTK's tree view.
> This seems a bit strange to me as a number of other tree views work 
> just
> fine. Are there any outstanding issues with tree views that anyone is
> aware of? If so, and if that is truly what is blocking access to the
> Empathy contacts list, that seems pretty major.
>
> Then again, I have seen a similar issue elsewhere, so I suppose this is
> a possibility. Banshee uses what I assume is a tree view for its list 
> of
> sources, and this also fails to speak accurate information when they 
> are
> arrowed between. This seems identical to what Empathy is doing.
>
> My initial thought was to locate the point in libempathy-gtk where text
> was assigned to the contact list rows and set the accessible name of 
> the
> cell to the text. Seems like this should automatically be done, but I
> figured helping the process along couldn't hurt. Only my newness to GTK
> seems to be hindering me. Seems there are CellRenderer classes which, I
> presume, eventually route the text to a widget on-screen, and there is
> an update function that I assume does this, but the only widget it 
> seems
> to hold a handle to seems to be the parent table. If I set the
> accessible name of the widget to, say, "foobar," "foobar" is spoken 
> when
> I tab to the contacts list only once, but none of the contacts' names 
> or
> any text in the cells seems to be "foobar".
>
> It looks as if these renderers are part of GTK. Is there any way to get
> the cell to which they are rendering so I can set its accessible name
> correctly? Or am I completely on the wrong track? :)
>
>
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