GUADEC summary

[Piñeiro <apinheiro igalia com>]

Hi folks,

as promised, but somewhat late, a summary of what happened at the GUADEC
that touched accessibility. Joanmarie, Juanjo Marin, Alejandro Leiva,
Javier Hernandez, Daniel García and others were also there, so they can
send a summary if I forgot or just don't know something.

* Before GUADEC: UX hackfest [1]. I have been there. It was really
convenient (it was organized on the same office I work every days), it
would be good to be informed about new features and designs, and it was
a good place to talk about some design related issues that affects these
days accessibility. I talked a little with Allan Day, Cosimo and Meg
Ford, but in general I was more a listener of the hackfest, as I talked
more about accessibility stuff with Allan on the a11yCamp (later)

* Presentations about accessibility: I made two presentations about the
status of the union of the accessibility team on GNOME. A little one at
the Advisory Annual General Meeting (AGM) (where each team made the
same), and a bigger one as a official GUADEC talk. This last one didn't
have too many people. The main reasons were that it was the first talk
of the morning of the last GUADEC day, and scheduled at the same time
that other really interesting talks (like the GStreamer one). Taking
that into account I'm not sure it it is worth to do again that 25
minutes talk about the status of the accessibility. The main reason is
that I'm already doing that presentation at the AGM, and the advantage
of the AGM is that I will have more people listening (as the AGM doesn't
have any other talks at the same time). At this moment I think that next
year the AGM status of the union talk would be enough, and that if I
propose a accessibility-related talk it will be to talk about something
specific, not the general status. My only concern is that AGM
presentation is just 5 minutes long.

* GUADEC had two Wayland related presentations. On the first one
("Wayland for application authors") I asked to Rob Bradford (the
speaker) if it would be possible in Wayland to insert synthetic keyboard
and mouse events, and if it would be possible to watch to all those
events. This is related to the task of remove the key snooping from the
accessibility framework (more info on this X related thread [12]).
Robert answered that right now it is not possible, they didn't thought
about that, but there is still time to discussion. On the second one
("Gnome Shell as a Wayland compositor"), Bastien Nocera made a similar
question. He asked about the possibilities to extend gnome shell as a
wayland compositor, mentioning accessibility as one of the use cases.
Rober Bragg (one of the speakers) answered that the Wayland protocol
supports an easy way to add extensions. It can be done first on any
specific compositor (ie:gnome shell), and then move that to Wayland
itself if it is interesting. Taking into account the lack of answer from
X developers (except in the case of Alan Coopersmith that was always
willing to help), I added on my TODO an action item of sending a mail to
those people in order to initiate that "discussion".

* a11yCamp [2] we have a two days of unconference style hackfest. There
we talked with others teams, and hacked a little. Next bullet items are
all a11yCamp stuff.

* Bug triagging [3]: Andre Kappler came to the a11y camp, as he was
interested to know more about how to triage accessibility bugs.
Joanmarie prepared some slides and tests (you can find those here [3]),
and made a presentation about it. We also talked with Andre about how
the accessibility team could be aware of new accessibility bugs on
others modules, as the keyword "accessibility" is good to classify, but
doesn't allow subscription. Andre started a proposal on d-d-l [4]

* Hacking on evince: Daniel Garcia was trying to get back the
accessibility support that evince had [5]. After a little review this a
little during the a11yCamp, we found that was a problem related with how
the factories are used on gtk+ since the beginning of this year, as
third party gtk+ applications were using them to extend the gtk
accessibility objects. In my opinion, what gtk+ should do now is make
public the accessibility headers. I started a thread on gtk-devel
mailing list [6]. Some answers at the beginning, somewhat stagnated now,
not a conclusion yet.

* Accessible Email clients [7]: we didn't have any people from Evolution
or Thunderbird people, but we had some Yorba developers. They are
working on an email client called Geary [8]. As it is and gtk+
application and its mail view is based on WebKitGTK the good news is
that after a Joanmarie review, a lot of the interface is already
accessible. Yorba developers expressed their interest on making Geary
accessible, and also made some questions about how to detect and triage
accessibility bugs. Joanmarie pointed them the same slides that we used
for the bug triaging part, and she gave them an introduction.

* Sugar/OLPC [8]: some people from OLPC, Sugar and Dextrose were also
around. They showed the interest of accessibility, and we were talking
about different approaches and challenges. The usual sugar OS boot uses
several custom widgets (so they would require custom accessibility). But
they also allow to boot using GNOME.

* As he was around, I asked Allan Day to come to the a11yCamp room in
order to talk about some stuff. We talked a little about the new color
options at the zoom magnifier [10], but mainly about the problems of
Orca users accessing some elements of the top panel, like current wifi
or battery charge [11]. After that we made a global review about the
status of the keyboard navigation on gnome shell, talked about
keybindings and all that stuff.

* Mario Sanchez detected a security problem related with input entries
with passwords on WebKitGTK. He solved that.

BR

[1] https://live.gnome.org/Hackfests/UXACoruna2012
[2] https://live.gnome.org/Accessibility/BoFs/A11yCamp2012
[3] https://live.gnome.org/Accessibility/BoFs/A11yCamp2012/BugTriaging
[4]
https://mail.gnome.org/archives/desktop-devel-list/2012-July/msg00126.html
[5] https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=677348
[6] https://mail.gnome.org/archives/gtk-devel-list/2012-August/msg00001.html
[7]
https://live.gnome.org/Accessibility/BoFs/A11yCamp2012#Accessible_Email_Clients
[8] http://yorba.org/geary/
[9]
https://live.gnome.org/Accessibility/BoFs/A11yCamp2012#Sugar.2BAC8-OLPC_Accessibility
[10] https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=676817
[11] https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=667439
[12]
https://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-accessibility-list/2012-May/msg00007.html


-- 
Alejandro Piñeiro Iglesiasb