Dear readers, on the route to implementing automated UI tests in Sugar [1], I'm currently working on providing additional information about widgets to accessibility tools. Unfortunately, while I got the basic technology up and running, I'm not having much luck at identifying _what_ information I should expose and in what _form_. The only document that contains at least some minor hints is the "GNOME Accessibility Developers Guide" [2], but all it does is mention two examples [3,4] for descriptions and roles. The ATK Best Practices wiki page [5] might have been what I'm looking for, but it's just a list of things that _should_ be documented, rather than the documentation itself. Is there any document I missed and that would tell me what attributes I should add to the widgets used in Sugar and what values to give them? Some concrete questions I already have: 1. Which attributes should be translated? Gnome#525226 has some discussion about whether accessibility-name and / or accessibility-description should be translated, but there's no conclusion. What parts of the ATK API should be filled with english texts and what parts should be filled with translated texts? How should automated tools (e.g. test suites) discover elements and what texts should tools for users (e.g. screen readers) present to the user? 2. How should accessible-name and accessible-description be worded? The only hint I could locate were two examples [3,4] for accessible-description: "Opens Preferences dialog" Like with other parts of the UI, consistent wording is important to users. If different applications use different tense or different style (active/passive etc.), users can get confused. This is even more true for users with disabilities. Tools (like the test suite I'm going to work on) OTOH can easily cope, they only care about syntax (i.e. string literals), not semantics. 3. What attributes other than accessible-name, accessible-description and accessible-role are usually important to users and what values should they have? 4. The description of most attributes on AtkObject [7] is pretty weird. It says the properties are "used to notify that the [attribute] has changed". What does that mean? I would expect signals to be used for change notification, not properties. Do I need to do anything about those or will GTK already handle that for me in all cases? Sascha [1] https://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/What_is_Sugar%3F [2] http://developer.gnome.org/accessibility-devel-guide/3.0/index.html.en [3] http://developer.gnome.org/accessibility-devel-guide/3.0/gad-coding-guidelines.html.en [4] http://developer.gnome.org/accessibility-devel-guide/3.0/gad-api-examples.html.en [5] https://live.gnome.org/Accessibility/ATK/BestPractices [6] https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=525226 [7] http://developer.gnome.org/atk/stable/AtkObject.html -- http://sascha.silbe.org/ http://www.infra-silbe.de/
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