Accessibility TODO list

This is what we are working on at the moment.

The current main focus is on the keyboard event/shortcut support, because this is strongly needed for Orca to work with gtk4 or wayland.

1. At-spi bus connection

• Connection
  • Emmanuele: on wayland
    • between applications and AT
    • between AT
    • In at-spi2-core
  • Qt: ditto in Qt, Jeremy Whiting was wondering about it
  • Samuel: ditto on X11
• authorization on trusted AT
  • Emmanuele: on wayland
  • Samuel: ditto on X11

2. "what is under the mouse?" IPC

• need relative coordinates IPC
• Emmanuele: "mouse moved to another Accessible" notification (toolkit)
• Carlos: "mouse moved to another window" notification (compositor)
• Also between words within text

3. Key events/shortcuts

• Key events
  • Emmanuele/Samuel: reworked at-spi interface for key events
  • Mike: xinput2 for key events
  • Carlos/Pete?: wayland compositor support for key events

    • https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/-/merge_requests/1328

  • Carlos/Pete/Samuel: Braille device input support (some events to AT, some events normal keyboard)
  • Carlos/Pete/Samuel: other device input support (e.g. speech to text or devices yet to invent)
  • Carlos: wayland compositor support for xcompose / input method
• key shortcuts
  • Mike: xinput2 for key shortcut registration
  • Carlos/Pete?: wayland compositor support for key shortcut registration (in libinput?)

4. a11y stack revamping

• Emmanuele: go through IPCs for cleaning up (and Hypra check that we don't clean too much)
• Emmanuele: revamp at-spi2-atk / ATK
  • Emmanuele: making sure one can make homemade widgets accessible
  • Emmanuele: integrate in the widget authoring guide the documentation for making it accessible
  • Hypra: keeping an eye on what is needed for ATs

  • outline of approach: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/issues/2833

• Talking dbus directly
  • Emmanuele: create a generated stub library for talking dbus directly
  • Emmanuele: make gtk use it
  • Samuel: Update java-atk-wrapper, or rather make it use that library
  • Update webkit
  • Update Firefox, make it use library for own document rendering
  • Update Chromium, make it use library for own document rendering

  • Update LibreOffice, make it use library for own document rendering

• DONE There is an MR now: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/merge_requests/2239

5. a11y testing

• integrate gla11y call in gnome packages builds
  • DONE Samuel: whitepaper
  • Qt: Qt port, Matthieu Hazon was interested, mailed him. Also mailed André de la Rocha, who blogged last about Qt accessibility
  • Matthias: GTK tool
• gtk4-demo
  • gtk: Add a tab that contains the detail of what the user is supposed to be able to read, to make sure that a non-sighted person knows it managed to read everything.
  • hypra: Test it
• flatpak

  • hypra: Test accessibility working at all in flatpak (see Accessibility/TestingGtk) and report if it doesn't work

  • Emmanuele: make CI pipeline push latest flatpak image build on a stable URL
  • hypra: Test flatpak image when appropriate

6. misc

• Configurable bits (without having to go through a theme)

  • Matthias/Colomban/Alex: caret thickness (Colomban reports a bug), and port to gtk3 https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/issues/188 , merged in master for gtk4 and in 3.24.21

  • keep option to choose whether caret blinks or not

• DONE Emmanuele: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/merge_requests/1120

• DONE Sébastien: organize conf call to make a checkpoint 2nd or 3rd week of September
• Sébastien: when we feel it useful after testing the new at-spi implementation, organize conf call to make a checkpoint