GNOME Accessibility Team
Report for the Third Quarter 2010
Contents
Summary
Joanmarie Diggs and Alejandro Piñeiro Iglesias
The Accessibility Team continued improving the user experience with GNOME 2, while at the same preparing for the GNOME 3 release:
Documents within GNOME are becoming even more accessible: Daniel Garcia has been implementing the AtkText text interface in Evince and Poppler (the PDF library used by Evince). And Mario Sanchez continues to work on adding full accessibility support to WebKitGtk. By implementing this support in the environments being accessed rather than in the assistive technologies, Daniel and Mario are each bringing us much closer to having access that "just works" automatically for users.
- Emmanuele Bassi integrated Cally (Clutter's accessibility support) into Clutter beginning with version 1.4, resulting in yet another "just works" environment. Cally's creator, Alejandro Piñeiro, has also been actively working with Dan Winship, GNOME Shell developer in the areas of keyboard navigation, theming, and the implementation of accessibility support in certain Shell Toolkit widgets.
- David Teyssiere has been collaborating with Joaquim Rocha on OCRFeeder development: making the user interface fully and more compellingly accessible; improving content recognition, including new support for deskewing images; and adding spell-checker functionality and the ability to import images directly from the scanner.
- Joseph Scheuhammer continued his work on GNOME Shell's built-in magnifier, including the addition of color and contrast functionality, work on the user preferences dialog, and converting from GConf to GSettings. In order to provide continued support for gnome-panel users, Fernando Herrera ported gnome-mag from Bonobo to D-Bus and from Gtk+ 2 to Gtk+ 3. Work has also begun on porting gnome-mag's drawing to Cairo, which should improve its performance. Finally, Joseph and Fernando have been collaborating on a common D-Bus API so that Orca and other assistive technologies can easily work with either solution.
- Mike Gorse made progress on AT-SPI2, the D-Bus-based implementation of AT-SPI, fixing several critical bugs and improving performance.
- Javier Hernandez, Juanje Ojeda, and Alejandro Leiva have nearly finished with the implementation of the new Profiles system they have been working on for Orca. This system will make many things possible including multiple alternative keyboard layouts, fast language switching, and -- once AT-SPI2 is implemented within QT -- support for accessible KDE applications being used from within the GNOME Desktop.
- Joanmarie Diggs added support for a system voice into Orca so that users who are blind can better distinguish on-screen text from the supplementary information Orca provides. She also added additional support for users with print learning disabilities.
Fernando Herrera made many improvements to DOTS, GNOME's braille translator, including: Support for PDF and OpenOffice text documents, the ability to review lines while in Braille View and make formatting changes "on the fly", the addition of a translation table editor and printing support, and the creation of a new command line tool.
Many of these exciting changes -- and quite a few of this quarter's nearly 100 bug fixes -- are the result of the Guadalinfo Accessible Projects of the Junta de Andalucía in Spain, for which the Accessibility Team is extremely appreciative.
When not working on code, the team was busily preparing for October's AEGIS Conference and associated A11y Hackfest in Sevilla.
Going into the fourth quarter, the team plans to focus on GNOME 3.0.
Orca
GNOME Shell Magnifier
Submitted by Joseph Scheuhammer, 19 October 2010
GNOME Shell switched from GConf to GSettings for settings persistence (617917, 622524), including the magnifier's user preferences. The magnifier code was updated as appropriate.
Updated magnifier user preferences dialog to handle the switch from GConf to GSettings (see Magnifier Preferences Dialog section). Submitted patch to GNOME Shell (622414).
Submitted paper, presentation, and poster regarding the magnifier work for the AEGIS Europe conference in Seville, Spain (http://www.aegis-conference.eu/).
- Documented differences between GNOME Shell mag ("gs-mag") and the GNOME mag ("gnome-mag") D-Bus effort, and discussed with gnome-mag developers.
Fixed bug in gs-mag's D-Bus interface, where it incorrectly interpreted the RectBounds structure (626123). In parallel, updated Orca in terms of how it calls gs-mag using D-Bus (630644).
In progress
- Preferences dialog needs work:
- Decided to move its location in GNOME Shell's source code tree to the "tests" directory.
- GNOME Shell's switch to GTK3 appears to be incompatible with glade files with respect to comboboxes -- investigating.
- Began discussion with GNOME mag developers regarding common D-Bus API between gnome-mag and gs-mag.
- Adding colour and contrast functionality to gs-mag.
WebKitGtk+ A11y
Submitted by Mario Sanchez Prada, 20 Oct 2010
July & August
Kept working on WK bug 25898, by pinging the right people in Apple to review the patches and addressing the issues that were pointed out with each revision of them.
Fixed 38648, so GAIL is now always loaded when running the layout tests.
Fixed 42298, which was causing a regression in the shape of an API test crashing.
Fixed 25677, so now there's support for getting the character/range extents from an object implementing the AtkText interface.
Started to work on bug 26991, and got a patch for it (pending on review at that moment).
September
Fixed 26991, so now it's possible to retrieve the selection across object boundaries.
Fixed 25673, so now it's possible to select/unselect text through assistive technologies.
Fixed 45190, so a list item's marker (number/bullet) is no longer exposed as a child of the accessibility object associated to the list item.
Fixed 45381, to fix a weird behavior happening when trying to handle text offsets for list items with visible markers (number/bullet).
Fixed 45383, to fix incorrect exposure of list items whose children are elements (not inline children).
Fixed 45375, considered a regression, so from now on cursor navigation in caret browse mode is fully working again (only up/down arrows were working).
Fixed 25898 at last, after more than 2 months of work on it, so now the proper 'text-changed' events will be emitted when text changes in the typical text entry widgets.
Fixed 46284, improving some parts of the code in the ATK unit tests.
Fixed 46886, which was causing a crash in the integration system for debug builds of the GTK port, because of accessibility related code.
Started to work on bug 33785. Got a basic implementation apparently fixing the whole issue, but still needing more work.
Future
My plans for the incoming months is to keep working on a11y bugs in WebKitGtk+, with the ideal goal of fixing all those bugs blocking Orca support, if possible.
Cally and GNOME Shell
Submitted by AlejandroPiñeiro, 20 Oct 2010
- On July Emmanuele Bassi merged Cally on Clutter master
- Cally is now part of Clutter, not a isolated module
- On September was released Clutter 1.4, the first stable release with Cally integrated
- GUADEC
- Giving the talk "Cally: one year later"
- Talk with Dan Winship, working on some aspects of GNOME Shell a11y (keyboard navigation, theming and so on)
- Created bugs on GShell to start to add ATK support on some ST widgets
- Review of the provisional keyboard navigation patches on GShell
- Further test with ORCA
- Will require some extra ATK information
- Some provisional patches
- Helping in the coordination of AEGIS Hackfest
- Agenda
- Help Travel Committe
- Etc.
- Misc
- Some minor Cally bugs detected (and some solved)
- Some minor GNOME Shell a11y related bugs
- Keep updating patches uploaded on GNOME Shell bugzilla after review
AT-SPI2
Submitted by Mike Gorse, 21 October 2010
- Performance improvements. Only fire events if a program is listening for them.
- Fixed a crash.
States for AtkSockets are now retrieved from their embedded plugs.
- Some pyatspi deadlocks and issues with events in automated tests have been fixed.
dots
Submitted by Fernando Herrera, 31 Oct 2010
Consorcio Fernando de los Rios sponsored this project in the context of Guadalinfo Accessibility project. The Goal was to create a Braille transcriptor program for the GNOME desktop with support for OpenDocument, PDF and html input formats formats that translates into computer Braille representation so you it can be directly send to a Braille printer (embosser). As there was an initial effort to create a Braille translator for GNOME, dots by Eitan Isaacson, this project was defined to improve and extend dots.
Achievements
- Split the ui from the logic
- A new command line tool
- Support for PDF and odt documents
- Formatting changes on the fly
- Translation table editor
- Printing support
- Review line while in Braille view
- Translations and documentation
Future
Dots is starting to get new external contributors and interest from other parties, so the development will continue not only in maintenance mode but also adding new features.
gnome-mag
Submitted by Fernando Herrera, 31 Oct 2010
GNOME 3 will use by default GNOME Shell UI that includes its own magnification module. However gnome-panel based shell will still be shipped as a legacy UI. For those legacy users gnome-mag is the only magnification option. During this gnome-mag has been ported to GNOME 3:
- Port from bonobo to dbus (initial work from Carlos Eduardo Rodrigues finished by Carlos García Campos and Fernando Herrera)
- Port from gtk+ 2 to gtk+ 3 (with the help of Benjamin Otte)
- in-progess port to cairo drawing
OCRFeeder
Submitted by Joaquim Rocha, 6 Nov 2010
In Q3 the work done in OCRFeeder was mainly a11y related, besides the obvious bug fixing. Igalia worked on these tasks in collaboration with Emergya who had won a grant to improve OCRFeeder's a11y.
The main a11y related tasks done in Q3 were:
- Improve the overall a11y of OCRFeeder (that is, adding mnemonics, tooltips, setting accessible names, ensure the actions of the widgets are also understood by using only Orca, etc.)
- Select content areas using menus (before, they could only be selected with the mouse)
- Delete selected areas from the menu (before, they could only be deleted with a keyboard shortcut)
- Improve the recognition of contents (mainly adjusting the boxes to its contents and better recognition of columns)
- Clean the recognized text so it removes "false" newlines (improves Orca reading)
- Add progress dialogs when performing time-taking operations
- Add the ability to perform actions automatically after adding images
- Copy all content areas' text to clipboard
- Add spell-checker support
- Import images from scanner
- Add support for deskewing images
Evince
Submitted by Lorenzo Gil Sanchez, 7 Nov 2010
Consorcio Fernando de los Rios sponsored this project in the context of Guadalinfo Accessibility project. The Goal was make the main Evince widget acccesible by implementing the AtkText interface. Some work has been done in Evince but most of the work has landed in Poppler, the pdf library Evince uses to read and render PDF documents. The work was done from May to September, 2010.
- Tasks completed:
- Tasks in Progress:
- Evince: Caret mode
Poppler: 27999 TextPage::getText in rawOrder doesn't work
Future
After a metting with Joanmarie Diggs, she asked some more a11y features in Evince, specially the caret mode is quite important. Also, if we can read tagged PDFs and use the semantic information found in them we could make Evince much more accesibily by exposing all that information through the appropiate ATK interfaces.