People Present (Lines Said)

• Joanie - joanie (416)
• Piñeiro - API (328)
• Patrick - prlw1 (59)
• Joseph - clown (49)
• Mike - mgorse (27)
• Aline - alibezz (23)
• Ale - aleiva (11)
• Javi - jhernandez (12)
• Brian Nitz - bnitz (2)
• Brian Cameron - yippi (2)

Meeting Summary

Meeting started by API at 14:34:33 UTC. Meeting ended at 17:40:35 UTC.

Women's Outreach Program

• Aline reorganized her opw schedule and is now working on Accerciser documentation. The work-in-progress

New Co-maintainers

• Piñeiro is a new ATK co-maintainer, atk.doap created, still pending: update MAINTAINERS and check master.gnome.org access.
• Mike added Li to AT-SPI2 .doap and MAINTAINERS files, and Li already has access to master.
• Joanie pinged Javi about applying to access master.gnome.org. He will do that. Brian also gave Javi permission to commit the patch for Accerciser's .doap and MAINTAINERS files. So the Accerciser co-maintainership should be set.
• Joanie pinged Eitan regarding Caribou maintainership. He proposed two possible candidates. One being Joaquim Rocha. But Joaquim is extremely busy these days. Thus we still need to address this for Caribou.
• The Dasher maintainer (Patrick) is interested in becoming co-maintainer of Caribou especially given its obvious ties with Dasher and Nomon.

Recent Mailing List Discussions

History/Background

• Joanie responded to a question on the gnome-accessibility-list Olav had asked about work on gnome-shell mag's new inverse brightness capability.

• A new thread on the Release Team mailing list began regarding Joanie's message. Amongst Olav's questions/concerns is "I think above summary is giving the impression that Accessibility is not important, while it is."

• Joanie does NOT see the release team's decision to remove Accessibility as an indication they do not care or feel Accessibility is not important. Instead, her concern about the Release Team's decision to remove Accessibility from the 3.1 "features" page is that it greatly decreases its visibility and thus removes it from the forefront of the minds of other groups (Design Team, Foundation Board, etc., etc.).

• Furthermore, Joanie is NOT worried about this now-past decision of the Release Team. But she IS quite concerned about the issues raised by Matthias in his subsequent response.

Testing Distro

• Joanie proposes the following solution:
  • With respect to the Accessibility testing distro, the team would like to investigate the possibility of coordinating efforts with Frederic Crozat.
  • The aim would be to collaborate on a single, new "unstable" testing environment -- an environment which would not be specific to accessibility, but open to all GNOME teams.
  • This new environment would facilitate testing modules and solutions proposed for inclusion the next stable release of GNOME without requiring users and other contributors to create a full jhbuild environment and apply patches to unstable releases.
• Members present at the meeting agree with this proposal.

Gail's Integration into Gtk+ (the "drop-gail" branch)

• In general, the a11y community still has less resources than ideal, taking into account the large amount of work still pending.
• Joanie proposes that we contact Li directly via email and ask him to give us a realistic estimation of how much time Oracle will allow him to work with Matthias and Benjamin (and whoever else) on the integration of Gail into Gtk.
• Piñeiro shall contact Li about his ability to contribute to the efforts to integrate Gail into Gtk+.

• Piñeiro has sent a follow-up message to Benjamin.

• Piñeiro shall also contact Benjamin and Matthias about their ability to contribute to the efforts to integrate Gail into Gtk+.
• Joanie will maintain the corresponding wiki page if she knows what the latest status is.
• With respect to Matthias' statement that he as "not seen any real interest in (the Gail integration into Gtk+) from the a11y side", Joanie would like to go on record as saying that this perception is incorrect and the result of a miscommunication between our respective groups. Furthermore, Joanie would like each of the groups (Accessibility, Gtk+ developers, and the Release Team) to seek ways to ensure such miscommunications do not occur in the future.

Accerciser

• Javi will investigate Matthias' statement that when he tries to run Accerciser in jhbuild on his system, it "locks up solid after a few minutes every single time."

Requirements for Improving Accessibility

• Joanie is interested in having some clarification regarding Matthias' statement that "I don't see many hopeful signs for a11y improving in 3.2 or 3.4." She proposes that we seek clarification from Matthias to determine if he has additional concerns (beyond those of the "isolation" and lack of "any real interest" he believes are present in our team). If he, or other members of the Release Team, do have such concerns, Joanie requests that those concerns are identified and communicated directly to the Accessibility team.
• Mike asked about what would be needed in order to have accessibility support enabled by default. Piñeiro answered that in general they want to enable this support without any perception of performance loss.
• Joseph added that rather than "no loss of performance", it seems more realistic to aim for "without making the desktop unusable"
• For GNOME 3.1.3, Mike will modify atk-bridge not to listen for atk signals and send out events unless an AT is listening. This will likely involve modifying at-spi2-core as well, to add a way of tracking active ATs.
• In summary:
  • Areas identified by the team include the changes Mike proposed making to AT-SPI2 and addressing the poor performance problems associated with the Gail treeview.

  • Joanie is interested in knowing what additional areas must be addressed (and/or investigated) prior to our even being able to consider enabling accessibility support by default.

  • Joanie would very much like Matthias and other members of the Release Team to identify what areas must be addressed/investigated specifically so that we can prioritize this work and seek additional resources if needed and possible, with the goal being achieving them by 3.2 if at all possible -- and if not, progressing to inclusion by 3.4.

Responding to Matthias and the Release Team

• Piñeiro will share with Matthias and the Release Team the minutes of this meeting once they are posted and highlight some of the questions we have for Matthias.

Summary of Action Items

New

• Piñeiro shall contact Li about his ability to contribute to the efforts to integrate Gail into Gtk+
• Piñeiro shall also contact Benjamin and Matthias about his ability to contribute to the efforts to integrate Gail into Gtk+
• Joanie will maintain the 3.2 planning page's entry for the Gail integration into Gtk+ if she knows what the latest status is.
• Javi will investigate Matthias' statement that when he tries to run Accerciser in jhbuild on his system, it "locks up solid after a few minutes every single time."
• For GNOME 3.1.3, Mike will modify atk-bridge not to listen for atk signals and send out events unless an AT is listening. This will likely involve modifying at-spi2-core as well, to add a way of tracking active ATs.
• Piñeiro will share with Matthias and the Release Team the minutes of this meeting once they are posted and highlight some of the questions we have for Matthias.

Ongoing / Rolled-Over

• The team needs to classify the tasks identified during the ATK hackfest in short-medium-long term and prioritize each
• The team need to prioritize the Accerciser plugins for GNOME 3 migration work
• Piñeiro will contact Dan to know if he is planning to work on other a11y tasks, like themes
• Brian will send a mail summarizing his proposal regarding a testing-centered design
• Ale will write something up about the "Orca summit"
• Piñeiro will review the documentation page.
• Joseph will investigate if it is feasible to call libatspi using javascript (ie: on gnome-shell)
• Javi will do the work needed in Accerciser to move from gconf to gsettings, and from pygtk to introspection.
• Regarding Brian's Mago testing framework:
  • Brian will announce his tests on the gnome-accessibility-devel list.
  • Brian will create a README and an INSTALL for his tests.

• Joanie will keep LibreOffice and working with that community on her list.