gnome 3.4 accessible: status, news, future (fosdem 2012)
DESCRIPTION
By Alejandro Piñeiro Iglesias. In GNOME, accessibility is a core value that touches all aspects of the system. [1] From the infrastructure, to the graphical toolkit, to the applications, to the assistive technologies, accessibility has been a central consideration from the very early days. On April 2011 GNOME 3.0 was released, and although GNOME and the accessibility made a huge effort, the accessibility support was not ideal. But not are bad news. Finally the accessibility technologies are starting to be used from the two main free desktops. AT-SPI is starting to be used on KDE distros, and Orca is starting to be functional with Qt apps. Since GNOME 3.0 a big effort was done in order to improve the situation. At the moment of this proposal writing an ATK/AT-SPI2 hackfest is being organized, in order to fix the issues from the framework itself. The purpose of this presentation is explaining: * Introduce accessibility on GNOME. * Briefly explain the status towards GNOME 3.4 * Summarize the output of the ATK/AT-SPI2 hackfest * Compare GNOME 3.0 vs GNOME 3.4 * KDE status and cooperation * Future [1] http://library.gnome.org/devel/accessibility-devel-guide/nightly/gad-how-it-works.html.enTRANSCRIPT
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Hey guy, this room is called CrossDesktop Devroom,
you know?
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Let's try it again ...
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Introduction, terms and stuff
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Accessibility?
● Means remove barriers to access
● Related to universal design
● We want a product usable to the greatest extent
possible by everyone
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Examples please
● Visual-only user interfaces
● Fixed display sizes or styles
● Audio or Video-only prompts
● Dependance on mouse, multi-key gestures
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What can we do?
● Programs require to provide:
● Programmatic access
● Keyboard navigation
● Themes
● Etc.
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Accessibility? Why?
● It increases your user base
● It helps you address accessibility guidelines
● It's the right thing to do
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The long road to cross-desktop(Some history)
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At the Dawn of Time
● 16 Oct 2000, “GNOME Accessibility Summit”
● Sun, IBM and others joined the party
● Accessibility had a really big push
● A lot of new stuff 2000-2005
● ATK, AT-SPI, Gail, Gnopernicus, LSR
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That old GNOME 2.0
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So, why just GNOME?
● Well, Sun had enough with GNOME
● KDE people were also interested but …
● AT-SPI was based on CORBA● At that time CORBA/Bonobo were “stars” technologies at GNOME
● KDE didn't like too much CORBA ...
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… in fact
● Seems that nobody liked CORBA/Bonobo
● GNOME decided to deprecate it on 2007
● Accessibility community worried
● Mail from Ariel Rios, May 2007● http://mail.gnome.org/archives/release-team/2007-May/msg00030.html
● Boston Summit 2007
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DBUS is coming
● DBUS is the new and shiny IPC
● But this port is not something trivial
● That would require a good amount of resources
● Resources, now that you mention that word ...
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Bad times
● 1 Jun 2007, IBM “change strategies”
● LSR dies (Orca survives)
● 27 Jan 2010, Sun is acquired by Oracle
● Sun decreasing workforce is mostly removed
● Willie Walker stops to be a11y leader and Orca
co-maintainer
● Orca survives as a community-driven project
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There are still some hope...
● Codethink starts AT-SPI2, funded initially by Nokia● Developer: Mark Doffman● http://blog.floopily.org/2008/04/23/codethink-d-bus-based-accessibility/
● Then other contributions from Novell or OpenSuse
● Right now is mostly volunteer-driven
● AT-SPI2 not “functional enough” until 2010
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The past is boring! What happens now?
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GNOME 3.X
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GNOME 3.0
● GNOME 3.0 was a challenge
● New AT-SPI2 (major component)
● New toolkits like Clutter
● Major updates on old toolkits, Gtk3
● New Desktops: GNOME Shell, Unity
● Gsettings VS Gconf
● etc
● CSUN 2010 Accessibility Summit
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GNOME 3.2
● Stabilization of the resulting 3.0 stack● Now with a real environment
● Working on the functional regressions
● Some new features● GNOME Shell on-screen-keyboard
● Built-in magnifier
● ATK-AT/SPI2 hackfest 2011
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KDE
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AT-SPI2 is DBUS based
● So, KDE became accessible ?
● No: qt-bridge required a lot of work
● Frederik Gladhorn retake the work on Qt and the
bridge on 2011● http://labs.qt.nokia.com/2011/04/01/not-yet-accessible/
● http://labs.qt.nokia.com/2011/08/23/accessibility-on-linux/
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Is something working?
● Right now things start to works
● People started to poulish apps, like Kate or Unity
2D
● Still not fully functional, but almost
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We love Accessible Tools!
● GNOME has Orca, lets start Korka!
● Eeemmm, … why?
● KDE people are testing all the stuff with Orca
● Remember: cross-desktop! Reuse stuff!!● Note: probably Orca would require some kind of Qt GUI
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XFCE
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Status
● Thanks to be GTK+ based, XFCE is largely
accessible
● The tricky part is getting accessibility enabled
● Current accessibility stack is really GNOME-alike
● They included accessibility on his roadmap● http://wiki.xfce.org/releng/4.10/roadmap/accessibility
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So, what we have here?
● Most big distros includes GNOME, KDE and XFCE
● Users will soon be able to get three accessible(ish)
desktop environment
● This would mean more testing and feedback
● Still some work required on how enable accessibility
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Future
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GNOME 3.4
● Like 3.2: working on stabilization and performance
● New features:
● Zoom dialog
● Brightness and Contrast functionality
● More ATK support for GNOME Shell
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ATK/AT-SPI2 Hackfest
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ATK/AT-SPI2 Hackfest
● People from GTK, ATK, AT-SPI2, Mozilla, WebkitGTK,
Qt
● Conclusions:
● Still a lot of work to do
● Not a lot of people
● Still a lot of questions without answer
● Stop to use the bridge as a module/plugin => 3.6
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A summary?
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Current status
● We have an accessibility framework
● We already have users
● But: Not enough ATs or people
● Bus factor of one in several cases
● What we need: improve the base, more ATs, more
people
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Questions?