Re: [joanied gnome org: Re: Negativ Layout in Gnome 3]

[Piñeiro <apinheiro igalia com>]

On 06/01/2011 02:16 PM, Matthias Clasen wrote:
> > Was done recently. FWIW, when I mentioned that on the weekly a11y meeting, I
> > started to receive some personal messages (IRC+mail, yes, more than one),
> > wondering if that means that GNOME didn't care about accessibility. Was hard
> > to explain there wasn't any different on the plans to keep improving a11y,
> > and that this change was just a coordination change. Some people felt that
> > this change removed a lot of visibility of the accessibility work. I was
> > also surprised that this change became so conflictive, although I agree
> > about that this change makes accessibility a little less visible.
> This may sound controversial, but here it goes:

Well, my mail was also controversial on his own.

> I think we have to be honest about the fact that a11y is not a
> first-class feature of GNOME until it is fully integrated. That means
> being turned on by default, without making the desktop unusable. In my
> opinion, the only way to get there is if the a11y team starts
> perceiving itself as a part of GNOME, not as something that gets
> 'tacked on' from the side...

In my opinion a11y team is right now tacked from the side because the 
rest of the community didn't perceive it as part of GNOME.

Although I'm somewhat a newcomer on the a11y team, I feel that this is 
somewhat related on how accessibility was introduced on GNOME. GNOME 
started, it was cool, and suddenly two big companies Sun and IBM wanted 
to bring accessibility on it. And that team was mostly working on his 
one, working on a isolated module (gail) and the community get used to 
that status, a status were they didn't need to care about accessibility 
because others were working on that.

>  From my perspective, the a11y team is far too happy to be inits own
> little corner, working on its 'testing distro' and its own little
> tools that need to work on every OS and thus end up working properly
> on none of them. Yet, when I try to run accerciser in a jhbuild tree
> on my system, it locks up solid after a few minutes every single
> time...

IMHO this is not the case. For years the a11y leading people, Joanmarie 
and Willie Walker were asking for a change of mentality of GNOME. For 
years they asked the community to internalize accessibility. In the case 
of Orca, most of their problems are blocked by bugs in other components, 
and they get tired of the default "patches are welcome" answer. Although 
this answer is theoretically valid on the free software world, it can't 
be the answer to all the bugs blocking the accessibility. Or at least 
not if accessibility were properly integrated on the community.

About this testing distro: again, this is just a temporal solution. This 
is just a way to have a gnome 3 environment, were test quickly last 
changes on a11y modules. It was really useful to test things from 
release 3.0 to 3.0.1. And it will not last for a long time.

All those problems with accerciser (and probably at-spi2) are really 
unfortunate. In summary this was a effect of constantly postponing the 
inclusion of at-spi2 on any distro. This was really odd. Bonobo/ORBit 
are deprecated, and one of the major reasons for the technology change 
were the distros. But then they postpone using at-spi2 because it was 
mature enough, of course without providing any resource to solve it. 
Anyway, taking into account that at-spi2 right now is mostly leaded by 
Mike Gorse in his spare time, in a "lone rider" mode, all the work done 
is really awesome.

> Sorry for venting frustration here; I have been trying to push for a
> change to this, by starting a drop-gail branch, and by asking Benjamin
> to look at a11y issues in GTK+, but so far I have not seen any real
> interest in it from the a11y side. The wiki page now says this about
> gail/gtk: 'Wait for Benjamin to finish his work so we can test it'.
> Things are not going to work like that....

On that thread Brian Cameron, Li Yuan and me sent several mails. Being 
against Benjamin proposals is not the same that doesn't have any 
interest (BTW, on my TODO I have pending to send a mail to get a 
conclusion on that mail). And about what it is written on the wiki. I 
don't understand. We thought that Benjamin wanted to check it, so we 
supposed that he was the key contact here, so next step is getting more 
information from his side. How many people do you think that have a11y 
knowledge and specifically gail? AFAIK, Li Yuan (alway busy), me (from 
my hildon experience, already struggling with gnome-shell accessibility) 
you and Benjamin. What kind of reaction were you waiting for?

Because this is other of the inherent problems of accessibility. There 
isn't too many people with experience or interested to work on that field.

And I will use myself as example. Right now I'm half of the a11y 
two-headed coordination, in spite of being one with less experience 
(experience==years working on that) on the field, compared with other 
people of the community. For me it was always shocking how fast I became 
someone "important" on the a11y community, taking into account that I'm 
the "clutter a11y guy", and his main consumer, GNOME-Shell, doesn't have 
a proper a11y support yet. You can extract your own conclusions from that.

Don't worry about the frustration. In general, "frustration" applies to 
most of the aspect of current GNOME accessibility.

> I don't see many hopeful signs for a11y improving in 3.2 or 3.4.

WIP



--
Alejandro Piñeiro Iglesias (API) (apinheiro igalia com)