Re: yelp accessibility for people with disabilities

[Don Scorgie <DonScorgie Blueyonder co uk>]

On Fri, 2006-06-09 at 12:15 -0500, Shaun McCance wrote:
> On Wed, 2006-06-07 at 13:52 -0700, Lynn Monsanto wrote:
> > Hi all,
> > 
> > I'm working on Orca, a screen reader and magnifier for people with 
> > disabilities (see http://live.gnome.org/Orca).  I'm working on 
> > accessibility to yelp, and discovered that yelp uses mozilla to present 
> > help information.  A screen reader like Orca works by speaking the 
> > contents of the desktop component that has keyboard focus.  In the case 
> > of yelp, Orca speaks the help information displayed by mozilla.
> > 
> > Yelp currently has some accessibility problems that it shares with 
> > Firefox.  We are working with the Firefox team to fix the accessibility 
> > problems in Firefox 3. It would be great if the Firefox fixes also fix 
> > some (or all) of the accessibility problems in yelp.  This would occur 
> > is yelp shares the same mozilla libraries that Firefox uses.  Could 
> > someone enlighten me about the relationship between the mozilla that 
> > Firefox uses compared to mozilla that yelp uses.
> 
> Hi Lynn,
> 
> There's a long-standing bug about accessibility problems in Yelp:
> 
> http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=157941
> 
> It's not so much a single outstanding issue, but rather a single
> bug number where we keep getting reports of all the issues that
> crop up.  Bill Haneman has been involved in these discussions.
> I'm sure you must talk to him regularly.
> 
> As for Yelp's relationship to Firefox, Yelp uses the same checks
> as Epiphany to decide which Gecko library to build against.  It
> checks for mozilla, seamonkey, firefox, thunderbird, and xulrunner.
> I think most large vendors are shipping Yelp built against Firefox,
> although I would like to see xulrunner become a core piece of our
> platform offering.
> 
> Accessibility improvements in Firefox should trickle down to Yelp.
> Even if Yelp isn't built against Firefox, those sorts of changes
> should propagate through the various Mozilla projects.  If there
> are problems in Yelp that don't happen in other Gecko programs,
> we'd like to know.  Gecko isn't the easiest library to work with,
> and sometimes we just don't have everything hooked up right.

Hi Lynn,

Just to add (to save trawling through the bug report):
Yelp uses gtkmozembed stream API (for the most part).  The biggest
problem arises because of mozilla bug:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=293670
(streams don't emit a children_changed::add signal)
Currently Yelp works around this by emitting the signal a few seconds
after the page has loaded.  It isn't a very good workaround, but its
better than nothing.

Apart from this problem, the reading of menus in docbook files (well,
the HTML generated from docbook file) is fairly inconsistent when using
gnopernicus (sorry, haven't tried Orca yet).  This can be seen by
opening a manual (e.g. the gnome user guide) to the front page (with the
list of content) and trying to get this read by a screen reader.  I
don't know if Orca is affected by this, nor whether firefox / epiphany
suffer from this.

Don