Re: [g-a-devel] The a11y ghetto

[Brian Cameron <Brian Cameron Sun COM>]

Matthias:

A few comments.

> (ccing Kjartan, since he did the last few gnome-canvas releases)
>
> At the Gnome summit, Bill Haneman approached Owen and me again about
> moving the a11y implementation from gail into GTK+. This was discussed a
> number of times already, but it never happened. We hope to achieve a
> number of things by this move:
>
> - Make a11y implementations a more integral part of the process of
>   adding new interfaces to GTK+.
>
> - Giving a11y implementations access to internal GTK+ apis
>
> - Sharing the maintenance cost among a larger group of people

Yes, this is a good idea.  I think quite a few gail implementations
have some performance issues because sometimes it is not so effective to
get the information via GTK+ API's.  For example, table row moves are
handled as delete and then add events, so the fact that the operation
was actually a move is lost.  Things like this would probably be
easier, faster, and cleaner to implement directly in GTK+.

> There are a number of obstacles to this:
>
> - gail currently has a gnome-canvas dependency

My understanding is that the gnome-canvas code was put in gail for
convenience (to avoid having a separate ATK implementation library
for GTK+ and libgnomecanvas0..  The gnome-canvas code probably should
move into libgnomecanvas directly just like the GTK+ implementations
are moving into GTK+.  Sounds like this is what you plan on doing.

> - besides the module, gail installs a small library of utility functions

Yes, these are designed to make it easier to implement the ATK functions
for those widgets that implement AtkText.  I think all GTK+ text widgets
use these common functions.  It would probably make sense for these to
become GTK+ interfaces since they hide a lot of the ugliness of
implementing AtkText.

> The rough plan we agreed on is this:
>
> 1) move the canvas a11y implementation to gnome-canvas to remove
>    the gnome-canvas dependency from the gail module
>
> 2) move the gail module into the GTK+ tarball as a separate module
>  
> 3) move a11y implementations from the module into GTK+ itself
>
>
> This plan does not cover the gail utility library mentioned earlier,
> maybe we want to deprecate it in favor of some a11y utility functions
> inside GTK+ itself.
>
> Bill agreed to look into the first step. Once that is done, I'll be
> willing to work on 2). The last step is something that can be done
> incrementally over time, it doesn't have to happen in one step.
>
> I think it is quite possible to get 1) and 2) done in time for the next 
> GTK+ release - the first step should probably be kept on a gnome-canvas
> branch until it is clear if the next GTK+ release will be ready in time
> for Gnome 2.18. There are certainly other compatibility concerns that I
> have not thought about...
>
> Comments ?
>
> Matthias
>
>
>
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