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

[Bill Haneman <Bill Haneman Sun COM>]

Shaun wrote:
> Hi Bill,

Hi Shaun:

> Could you tell me exactly what accessibility problems Gecko has?  I've
> put a lot of work into making Yelp respect theme and font settings, and
> it's better in that respect than it's ever been before.  There shouldn't
> be any problems for people with limited vision, such as those needing
> one of the high contrast themes.  I'm a known mouse hater, so I know
> that Yelp's keyboard navigation is good.

That's great news, and thanks for making those improvements.  I will try
them out in the next day or so.

> So, as far as I can tell, that just leaves people using screen readers. 
> Will pages not read properly from Gecko?  

I don't think so, at least not using mozilla-trunk.  But I'll test the
current code as soon as I have time to do a 2.9.1 build of gnome-help,
it may be a few days.

> Are there other issues that
> I'm not aware of?

There is also the issue of GOK users, who need hyperlinks in the HTML
text to be exposed via AtkHypertext, AtkHyperlink, and AtkAction.  This
is working with Mozilla in a special a11y branch, but I don't know how
much of it is working in the trunk (yet).

> Note that Yelp works directly with semantically rich DocBook files. 
> Isn't there any way we can hook the accessibility tools into Yelp such
> that they can read directly from the DocBook, rather than going through
> the (rather crappy) layer of HTML?

This wouldn't be a general solution, though it might be a nicer way to
get text content.  The problems crop up with the AtkComponent,
AtkAction, and AtkHypertext interfaces, which have elements that are
correlated closely to onscreen properties and positions, etc.

- Bill

> --
> Shaun
> 
>