Re: Gail next steps (was Re: GTK and ATK)

[Matthias Clasen <matthias clasen gmail com>]

On Sat, Jun 4, 2011 at 8:44 PM, Piñeiro <apinheiro igalia com> wrote:

>
> About this specific case it is about improve the documention:
>
> http://developer.gnome.org/atk/stable/AtkObject.html#AtkObject--accessible-name
>
> Or something else?

Well, more than that, really.

We need to know for each widget what the property is supposed to
contain. I guess this also requires coming to grips with the somewhat
haphazard way in which the acessible tree is different from the widget
tree: sometimes there is a single accessible that 'wraps up' a whole
widget subtree, e.g a button accessible 'hides' the image and label
children of the widget, and instead implements corresponding
interfaces itself. And the same is very much true for the
::accessible-name, which is often taken from 'somewhere below'.

> Anyway, I thought that the first step here was to migrate the current gail
> (with their virtues and drawbacks) to gtk. And although things would be
> easier with a good atk documentation, Im not sure if this is a blocking
> here.

I don't think we can treat that as a first step and hold off on doing
any other fixes until that migration is done.  The migration is a
significant undertaking, and will not be finished for 3.2.

>> 2. Test that the accessible implementations actually follow that spec.
>>
>> I want to be able to have a unit test in the GTK+ repository that
>> instantiates a widget, gets the corresponding accessible, and then
>> verifies that it has the expected properties. If we had such
>> testcases, it would not have taken 9 months from me committing the
>> breaking change to me committing the fix. On the other hand, the fact
>> that nobody filed a bug maybe tells us something about the amount of
>> real-life usage that the gnome3 accessibility stack currently gets...
>
> Real-life usage is mostly done by users. GNOME 3 is not accessible, or at
> least was announced as not accessible. In general most of the tests done by
> the users were mostly a disappointment  (ie: [1][2][3][4]). In summary:
> there is no real-life usage of the gnome3 accessibility stack. For the
> moment GNOME 3 accessibility stack is mostly developers tested.

I would say not even that, unless you mean just the handful of a11y
developers. I can't even turn on toolkit-accessiblity on my system;
evolution crashes as soon as I switch to the calendar...