Re: [g-a-devel] Coming to grips with the state of a11y in gtk

[Piñeiro <apinheiro igalia com>]

From: Matthias Clasen <matthias clasen gmail com>

> 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.

Well, during the a11y meetings, we detected two tasks that require
some work:

 * Review of new gtk widgets [1]
 * Review of the current state after the revamps on big widgets
   (specifically gtktreeview)

(although we concluded that this review should be included on the "new
gtk widgets" item [2], so probably [3] is superfluous).

Unfortunately here we face the problem of the busy state of Li Yuan,
current gail maintainer.

> 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.

Although move the gail implementation to gtk has his advantages, why
this would be better that just fix them directly on gail? One of the
big problems here is the lack of resources, so doing the move would
add a extra work that could be used to just fix the problems.

> 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...

That's obviously bad. Just for curiosity:
  * I guess that gtk3, right?
  * at-spi2?
  * Are you sure that at-spi1 is not there (I had some problems if by
    error I have both running at the same time)

BR

[1] http://live.gnome.org/Accessibility/GNOME3#A.22New.22_GTK.2B-_Widgets
[2] http://live.gnome.org/Accessibility/Minutes/20110120#GNOME_3.0
[3] http://live.gnome.org/Accessibility/GNOME3#GAIL

===
API (apinheiro igalia com)