Coming to grips with the state of a11y in gtk

[Matthias Clasen <matthias clasen gmail com>]

Hey,

I've spent the last night poring through gail bugs and code, and came
to the conclusion that we need to face the tough reality that the
state of a11y in GTK+ is sadly declining. There were years old patches
in  bugzilla which fix pretty obvious bugs; on top of that, I've fixed
at least one bug that would lead to instant segfault in the file
chooser when a11y is turned on.

I think we need to start over on the gail implementations, essentially.

Now, we obviously can't do that by throwing away all we have now and
start from a blank slate. The only way this can work, imo, is to move
implementations from gail to gtk 1-by-1 and fixing them up in the
process. I wonder if we can come up with some plan for how to organize
that practically.

The current state of affairs cannot be useful for anybody. While I was
digging at this with accerciser last night, it would let me poke
things for a bit, but as soon as I look back at the code, accerciser
would lock up hard, sometimes freezing random other applications in
the process...


Matthias