Re: [orca-list] Webkit

[Alex Midence <alex midence gmail com>]

Hi, Joannie,

Thanks for responding.  I sincerely hope you are not taking this as an
aspertion of any kind against you or the folks you work with.  Your
work is immensely appreciated and is to be commended.  If anything I
have written on this topic has offended you or made you feel attacked,
please accept my sincerest apologies for being such a poor writer as
to fail to parse my sentences in such a manner as nothing could be
further from my intentions.  I read over your e-mail a few times
before writing this response.  What you say makes sense but is quite
demoralizing.  That bug report you refered me to:  2 years and nothing
has been done on it.  I've encountered similar bugs for stuff like
Abiword and even entire libraries like WxWidgets.  The developers were
approached and said all sorts of nice encouraging things and then
relegated what is crucial to our very ability to use an application to
a nonpriority status often in favor of some asthetic thing or some new
feature or other and then, as happens in nonessentials in projects, it
gets backburnered or outright forgotten when something new or exciting
comes up.  Years and years go by, new libraries come into use, new
api's are invented and the problems persist on top of new ones with
new apps using new libraries which never quite make it to a11y year
after year.  I wish there were some middle ground that would prevent
such things from happening or significantly minimize their occurrence.
 I totally get the fact that they have a need to prioritize however,
they don't have the vested interest and motivation that we do and it
seems counter to the can do independent attitude one is taught to have
as a disabled person which basically says:  "Adapt to your situation.
Do the best you can.  Don't expect the world to adapt to you and don't
put yourself in a position where you will be reliant on somebody else
for living your life because you will no longer have control of it.
Sooner or later, the helpful person that is willing to walk you across
the street, give you rides to places, read things to you, ETC. ETC.
will be too busy, too worn out or otherwise unavailable to do it and
you'll be in a fix."  As long as we don't have a way to control what
is accessible from our end of things and as long as we are so very
reliant on a developer somewhere to implement one feature to his code
after he's already gone and used a library that is extremely
accessible out of the box, we'll continue to find ourselves hitting
brick walls when we go to use apps which are almost accessible but not
quite and which will remain in this state of being on the cusp of
usability for years and years.  Will Orca ever be set up such that
plugins can be created by individual users?  Do you think it's
realistic or doable to set up some sort of wizzard system tied somehow
to the preferences dialog which will enable users who don't
necessarily know how to code to create configurations that turn quasi
accesible apps into at least usable ones?  I've seen such things in
other screen readers on other platforms and the results they are able
to attain can be quite startling.  Brian Garaventa's wonderful work on
making HTML Kit accessible with Jaws comes to mind.  Jamal Mazrui's
very prolific production of scripts and such for Jaws and Window Eyes
are also a nice example.  I think the man knows Python.  I wish he
wandered over to Linuxland and tried his hand over here.  It'd be
interesting to see what he turned out with Orca if such things were
possible with it.  Just some thoughts.  Sorry about the length.

Have a nice evening,
Alex M



On 4/23/12, Joanmarie Diggs <jdiggs igalia com> wrote:
> Hey Alex.
>
> On 04/23/2012 06:06 PM, Alex Midence wrote:
> > Exactly my point in my prior message.  Does such a feature negatively
> > impact the experience for somebody who doesn't use a11y?
>
> I don't know. In the bug I filed against Gwibber, the developer
> mentioned it might raise some issues with their "non-standard scrolling
> behavior." By the same token, the developer did not ignore the bug or
> say "who cares?" See https://bugs.launchpad.net/gwibber/+bug/682235.
>
> I think the thing to remember is that most projects have a very small
> team of developers with quite a lot on their plates. They have to
> prioritize. So I just pinged the bug in question. If using Gwibber
> really matters to you, a constructive comment to that effect might prove
> beneficial.
>
> As for your other question about why not do it in Orca via AT-SPI2: That
> is less reliable and it is less performant. Compare how speedy Orca is
> in Epiphany versus Firefox; consider the fact that text selection is
> reported in Epiphany and not in Firefox; look at the thousands upon
> thousands of lines of fragile code Orca has for Firefox, compared to the
> hundreds of lines of code Orca has for WebKitGtk content; ask yourself
> why it is that any significant change in the Gecko accessibility
> implementation threatens the Orca user experience (hint: it's not
> because of a bug in Gecko or in Orca, but simply because something
> somewhere changed unexpectedly). The reason why the Firefox experience
> has the problems it does for Orca users is *because* we did for Gecko
> exactly what you are suggesting: Do it via AT-SPI2.
>
> So, yeah, I hear you. Your concerns are valid. But, I think that if we
> can get the developers of the apps we really care about (e.g. Gwibber)
> to enable caret navigation, we'll get the results we want for those
> apps. And as we come across additional apps, our bug reports can include
> a reference to those apps whose developers have already solved the
> problem. After all "please do this thing you don't yet know how to do"
> is not nearly as persuasive as "please do this thing, and by the way,
> here's some code that illustrates how to do it." <smiles>
>
> Take care.
> --joanie
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