Re: Orca new to web page accessibility, want to help in coding.

[Willie Walker <William Walker Sun COM>]

Hi Krishnakant:

There will be several interim releases of Firefox (and Orca) between now
and the time Firefox 3 is released.  In addition, all the work will be
done in the public eye so things will not remain mysterious boxes of
ooze that are tossed over the wall.

If you will be the the Boston area on October 9, there's an accessiblity
summit that includes an architectural discussion to it:

  http://live.gnome.org/Boston2006/AccessibilitySummit

We can also try to take some minutes of the summit to help others who
won't be able to attend.

With respect to Firefox, the thing I'd most like to see fixed is the
caret navigation problem.  The general message I get from the Firefox
accessibility lead is that it's too hard of a problem for them and
nobody wants to work on it.  In other words, if we want it to work, we
need to fix it ourselves (the beauty of open source!!!).  Maybe a fresh
set of eyes on the problem might yield something.

After that, there's differences in between the AT-SPI implementation of
the Gecko toolkit of Firefox and the semi-defacto standard
implementation in GNOME's GTK+.  Part of me wants to wrestle with
getting Gecko to do it the GTK way, but the other part of me says to
ignore that battle and just work around the differences using the Orca
script.  Right now, the general feeling I'm getting is that requests of
this sort will be too hard for the Firefox team to do, so we're better
off spending our time working around the differences via the Orca script
for Gecko.  In any case, most of this type of stuff just covers the GUI
components like push buttons, text areas, etc., which is the least
interesting facet of the browser accessibility problem.

The most important thing we need to focus on in Orca is interpreting
Firefox's AT-SPI implementation when it comes to the document content
itself.  This is where I expect we'll be spending the bulk of our time.
If you have a large amount of experience in interpreting DOM objects,
mucking with DHTML, etc., and don't mind using applications such as
"at-poke" to pore through big widget hierarchies, you might be able to
help us out here.

Will

On Mon, 2006-10-02 at 22:30 +0530, krishnakant Mane wrote:
> hello,
> I have been observing a lot of emails asking about the status of
> firefox accessibility with orca.
> I have also posted on the same issue a couple of times.
> I will however like to mention a particular point.
> it seams that the complete accessibility for firefox wont appear on
> the desktop for about 1 year at least.
> so I will like to make my contribution.
> I have also mentioned this previously that I am a good c and python developer.
> I want to know how web accessibility works on a conceptual level.
> I will particularly like to know what approach orca is taking for web
> accessibility including accessibility for html forms etc.
> I will then like to get into the firefox accessibility.  may be I will
> do some work from scratch or may be I will like to contribute if it
> will create any impact on the timeline.
> Krishnakant