Re: Gail next steps (was Re: GTK and ATK)

[Matthias Clasen <matthias clasen gmail com>]

On Wed, Jun 1, 2011 at 7:48 PM, Piñeiro <apinheiro igalia com> wrote:
> On 05/10/2011 04:28 PM, Benjamin Otte wrote:

> In fact, IMHO, some of the issues pointed by Benjamin would be solved by
> this [2] and the gail migration, but lets not talk about it. As I said,
> those are long term tasks, and the fact is that the current accessibility
> status needs to be improved also in the short and medium term.
>
> I also planned to define those short-medium tasks, but after reading again
> some mails, Matthias already did it in this mail [3], so I will not repeat
> that. I will just include that as task 1.5 I would include refactoring
> gailtreeview, one of the big problems related to performance that prevents
> having a11y enabled as default [5]

For making things work better in the short/medium term (ie before we
land a complete refactoring/rewrite of gail), I think two things are
essential:

1. Define the atk interfaces to a testable level.

One example that I have run in recently is
the 'name' property of AtkObject - it is not really defined at all
what this is supposed to contain, and how it is supposed to be used.
It turns out a change that I committed last September made menu
accessibles not have names - it turns out that that breaks ATs which
expected those names to be taken out of the labels contained in the
menuitems. This needs to be specified somewhere, so that we can then

2. Test that the accessible implementations actually follow that spec.

I want to be able to have a unit test in the GTK+ repository that
instantiates a widget, gets the corresponding accessible, and then
verifies that it has the expected properties. If we had such
testcases, it would not have taken 9 months from me committing the
breaking change to me committing the fix. On the other hand, the fact
that nobody filed a bug maybe tells us something about the amount of
real-life usage that the gnome3 accessibility stack currently gets...