Re: Orca FW: Is the Update-manager accessible with ?

[Willie Walker <William Walker Sun COM>]

Hi Ian:
> What is slightly more concerning is that whilst it is performing the update
> Orca doesn't respond at all - I presume this is a "safety feature" in case
> one of the updates is to Orca or a dependancy?    Once completed,
> accessability returns to the desktop, but not fully to the Update Manager.
>   

We (the GNOME community) are working on this as a whole.  It requires 
work across the infrastructure, and that should hopefully be ready for 
GNOME 2.18.

> I highlighted this on the Ubuntu list at the beginning of the month, and
> there have been a couple of other postings about other system applications
> that eithre have no accessability or very little apparently built in.
>   

The main problem is not that it's not built in (it typically is).  The 
main problem is that the assistive technology doesn't know when an 
application running as another user (e.g., root) is present on the 
machine.  There's been a lot of work in this space over the past few 
months to make sure these apps are exposed.  It's still churning.

> I have been pondering on this for some time.  It would seem logical that the
> Gnome developers use a common language to develop the Gnome apps, so how
> difficult would it be to have a common library so that the app developers
> can pick their controls with the necessary AT-SPI stuff already coded in,
> and have the application base modules already have the AT-SPI interface
> pre-built in?  This would mean that any GUI application built would
> instantly have the necessary interfaces in it, and we as a community
> wouldn't struggle so much.
>   

This is the goal.  There is a common library for toolkits to use (atk) 
which provides this support.  The GTK+ GUI toolkit uses is, OpenOffice 
uses it, Firefox/Thunderbird/Gecko use it, etc.  The only issues we run 
into are when: 1) an application developer decides they are smarter than 
the toolkit and absolutely must create their own widget, and 2) a 
toolkit developer decides they don't like existing toolkits and decide 
to write their own.  All we can do is these cases is remind these clever 
people that accessibility is important and that tools exist to help them 
make their brand new and improved stuff accessible.

Hope this clarifies things a bit.

Will