Re: Can the community work with Gnome to improve GTK+ a11y?

[Piñeiro <apinheiro igalia com>]

Hi Bill, comments inline

On 01/01/2012 12:11 PM, Bill Cox wrote:
> I agree about the combo box navigation.  That bothers everyone I
> suspect, not just the blind.  While it's obviously open to debate, I
> think greyed out menu items should be spoken when we auto-skip over
> them, so users know they are there without having to enter flat review
> on a menu item.  Do I understand correctly that they currently aren't
> available through at-spi?  

Sorry, you are wrong. Those menus are available. For example, accerciser
can see those menus. They are exposed, and the only difference with the
"non-greyed" are the states. This greyed objects don't have "active",
"focusable" and other similar states.

As Joanmarie said, Orca doesn't speech out those elements because those
elements doesn't receive the focus. In that sense, a quick thought: as
the hierarchy is exposed Orca know about the "siblings" of a object. So
if it is focused on a element, and then other different is focused, Orca
could check if some siblings are skipped. Anyway, as I said, this is
just a quick thought, not sure if the proper solution should be placed
on Orca or on GTK.

> If so, any fix will probably require a
> patch to the menu code in either gail or GTK+.  Now that gail is part
> of GTK+, does that mean Li has more authority to fix bugs in GTK+?

Well, as I said, GTK+ is already exposing all the data here. It is
exposing all the hierarchy, it doesn't matter if greyed or not, and also
exposing when the focus change. What kind of solution are you thinking
about? Should GTK+ provide a "fake" focus on those elements? Emit a
signal when the element is skipped?

> This sounds like Li's sort of thing to me, though I'd be happy to dive
> into the code and see what's up.

During the last months, Benjamin, one GTK+ developer, is the one doing
more work on a11y GTK (work means hundreds of commits). We could also
ask him about his opinion.

>
> I'll post to the usability list and see what happens.

Thanks.

Best regards.

-- 
Alejandro Piñeiro Iglesias