Re: Coming to grips with the state of a11y in gtk

[Emmanuele Bassi <ebassi gmail com>]

On Thu, 2011-02-17 at 09:43 -0500, Matthias Clasen wrote:

> The current state of affairs cannot be useful for anybody.

let's also look at the state of Atk's API, and what's required to do to
create an ATK implementation. when I looked at the accessible
implementations in GtkSpinner and GtkSwitch I was shocked at the
verbosity and roundabout way you have to go to implement an AtkObject.

plus, it's *really* hard to implement an an accessible widget with
anything else but C - and even there the type definition macros are just
papering over the byzantine incantations to register factories and such.

finally, Atk is strictly dependent on how GDK works - especially with
regards to events; I'm using Atk in Clutter, but there's a whole layer
devoted to translating Clutter code into what Atk expects from GDK. for
an abstract toolkit, that's a nice piece of fail right there.

chucking away Atk is not the way, but fixing its glaring issues would
make implementing a11y directly inside gtk+, and other toolkits, a lot
easier.

ciao,
 Emmanuele.

-- 
W: http://www.emmanuelebassi.name
B: http://blogs.gnome.org/ebassi