[g-a-devel] GTK+ a11y

[Bill Haneman <Bill Haneman Sun COM>]

Hi Matthias:

I've been away for a number of weeks as you may know, and have just
re-joined this list.

> Are we serious about a11y ?

Well, are we?  You seem to imply here that it's something 
"those a11y folks" are supposed to do.  I don't think it can work
that way; if 'we' (i.e. Gnome/Free-Software developers) want
accessibility to work, then we all need to share the labor, since
it's a big task.

> A few weeks ago, I asked about a11y gaps in new GTK+ feature,
> but I never heard anything back, except from our QA people, who
> try to use the a11y framework for automated testing. 
> 
> So I finally sat down last night and wrote minimal a11y
> support for GtkAssistant myself last night. 

Great, that's fantastic!  Thanks for doing what I suggest above, 
i.e. helping make new code accessible as part of the ordinary 
process of Gnome/GTK+ development.

> I also note that the icon view a11y implementation has been
> broken for a long time. This code has been accepted into GTK+
> under the premise that we would get help with maintaining it.

I didn't know there was any a11y code in gtk+ proper yet, 
usually it's all in gail.  Could you explain?

> Obviously, that is not happening. 

Obviously?  I don't know about this.

> I'm tempted to remove the
> icon view a11y code after 2.10, if nobody steps forward to
> fix it. Shipping broken code helps nobody...

Well, are there bugs against it?  Threatening to pull code 
doesn't help.  

I'd also like to note that there seemed to be consensus about a 
year ago that gail should be folded into gtk+ instead of kept
as a separate library, because of various maintenance issues.  I
think that's a great idea.  Note that we do desperately need help 
to maintain gail, since currently the co-maintainer is not 
really available to work on it and I am spending virtually all
of my time on other high-priority accessibility issues.  So please 
help us with patches and bugfixes.

Bill

> Matthias
>