Re: Removing gthtml2 (was Proposed modules for 2.10 wanted NOW)

[Bill Haneman <Bill Haneman Sun COM>]

On Wed, 2004-11-03 at 15:22, Mikael Hallendal wrote:
...
> > There is ongoing work on gecko accessibility but it is not in the
> > Mozilla trunk yet.
> 
> Any idea when this might happen? 

We (GNOME and a11y) don't have much control over this.  Since the work
on the branch is stabilizing, I would hope that it would happen in the
next 6 -8 months, but that is a guess.

> This was discussed even back when we 
> where targetting GNOME 2.0 and gecko was "in progress" of being made 
> accessable. It was also understood by all involved parties that Gtkhtml2 
> was a temporary solution.

Unfortunately we can't do much to expedite the pace of integration into
the Mozilla trunk.  Since Sun is resourcing most of the ATK integration
into gecko, we can influence progress on the branch, but not the rate of
the merge.

It _may_ be that we can get sufficient functionality out of the ATK
support that's already in gecko-HEAD, but we need to coordinate our
testing and integration with Shaun to see just how serious the current
feature gaps are.  I must emphasize that there has been no testing of
this configuration or integration testing of gnome-help+gecko +
assistive technologies up until now.  

> I agree with Shaun that it's probably best to get the accessibility 
> layer do something out of the docbook information directly rather than 
> do it through the HTML rendering widget.

This would require much more engineering work than retaining gtkhtml2
for one more release.  There are no resources available for a
docbook-to-ATK layer, and I don't think it's the right thing to do
anyway, for the general accessibility solution.  For general-case
accessibility (as opposed to just text-to-speech access), we need close
correlation between what ATK reports and what is rendered onscreen for
the sighted user, etc.  So my own opinion is that this option is less
feasible.

regards,

Bill

> Best Regards,
>    Mikael Hallendal
> 
> -- 
> Imendio AB, http://www.imendio.com/