Empathy accessibility

[Nolan Darilek <nolan thewordnerd info>]

I've wanted to run Empathy for quite some time, especially as its jingle
support reportedly works and I'd hoped to use it as an alternative to
skype. This seems to be the major accessibility showstopper, however:

http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=545282

In my brief tests, everything else seems to work.

I've been engaged in some low-grade pestering of the Empathy developers,
especially as it is officially included in GNOME now and I'm a bit
worried about this issue. Asking the developers about this produced a
stock answer I seem to get again and again when I file AT bugs against
other apps, "we don't know how accessibility works," so yesterday I sent
a link to the GNOME developers' accessibility guide, and today I decided
to look at the issue myself. I don't know too much C, and don't really
know GLIB/GTK at all, so am not sure how effective I'll be, but I've
really wanted to use Empathy for a while and figured it couldn't hurt to
check it out. So, questions:

Has anyone taken a look at this? The developer I asked claimed that the
bug wasn't on his end but was instead an issue with GTK's tree view.
This seems a bit strange to me as a number of other tree views work just
fine. Are there any outstanding issues with tree views that anyone is
aware of? If so, and if that is truly what is blocking access to the
Empathy contacts list, that seems pretty major.

Then again, I have seen a similar issue elsewhere, so I suppose this is
a possibility. Banshee uses what I assume is a tree view for its list of
sources, and this also fails to speak accurate information when they are
arrowed between. This seems identical to what Empathy is doing.

My initial thought was to locate the point in libempathy-gtk where text
was assigned to the contact list rows and set the accessible name of the
cell to the text. Seems like this should automatically be done, but I
figured helping the process along couldn't hurt. Only my newness to GTK
seems to be hindering me. Seems there are CellRenderer classes which, I
presume, eventually route the text to a widget on-screen, and there is
an update function that I assume does this, but the only widget it seems
to hold a handle to seems to be the parent table. If I set the
accessible name of the widget to, say, "foobar," "foobar" is spoken when
I tab to the contacts list only once, but none of the contacts' names or
any text in the cells seems to be "foobar".

It looks as if these renderers are part of GTK. Is there any way to get
the cell to which they are rendering so I can set its accessible name
correctly? Or am I completely on the wrong track? :)