existing contract for working in Evince a11y

[Lorenzo Gil Sanchez <lgs yaco es>]

Hi all,

as some of you already know[1] we [2] have been hired by Consortium
Fernando de los Rios for the Knowledge and Information Society,
supported by the Regional Government of Andalusia in Spain [3], for
improving Evince accesibility [4].

It is our primary goal to collaborate as much as possible with upstream
and so, we really want our patches to be included in Evince and Poppler.
In order to accomplish this we are going to use standard GNOME practices
for communication such as these mailing lists, bugzilla comments and
patches and irc channels.  We'd like to work in the openess from the
very beginning, sharing our ideas and experience to get feedback and
knowledge from the community.

We know a few people have tried to work on this task in the past just by
looking at bug 309015. Recently Sam, Javed and Juanjo already expressed
their interest on it. We really want to avoid duplicating efforts so we
better all say what parts are we working on.

Now for some technical details:

We are going to implement the AtkText interface in the EvView widget. In
order to do so we are going to need to change poppler a bit so it can
pass the necessary text layout information to Evince and not just pixel
information. Does this comment[5] on bug 309015 still makes sense?:

"Nicolay and he suggested me three steps to follow:

1) Replace poppler_page, poppler_selection and poppler_link with a single
poppler_markup that should contain a) letters combined in words b) their
coordinates c) links if required

2) use this poppler_markup to implement AtkText

3) use it in rendering selections and in text search"

Do you guys think it is a good starting point?

Best regards and sorry for the cross-posting :(

Lorenzo

[1] https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=309015#c47
[2] http://www.yaco.es
[3] http://www.consorciofernandodelosrios.es/
[4] http://live.gnome.org/Guadalinfo_accesible (check Lot 3)
[5] https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=309015#c24