Hello,

I am an Eclipse SWT developer, working to improve accessibility support for SWT on Linux.

Some background: SWT is a cross-platform Java UI toolkit which runs using GTK on Linux. Most SWT widgets match up to GTK widgets -- these are accessible by default via GTK. However we implement a custom GTK container, called SwtFixed, for custom widgets. These custom widgets do not map up to native GTK widgets and are drawn manually. The role of these widgets vary: from text editing to custom combos, etc. The main text editor in Eclipse is a custom widget, which means that accessibility for these widgets is important.

The issue: at present time, Orca is unable to read these custom widgets. It works on GTK2 semi-reliably, but GTK3 is unusable. Orca either hangs, crashes, or fails to read events/information from the custom widgets.

We currently have an accessibility implementation in SWT that was created long before GTK3 was around. From what I gather, it has not been regularly maintained since ~2012. The existing implementation uses ATK to enable accessibility in areas that GTK cannot (i.e., for custom widgets). I am virtually certain that the problem lies in the accessibility implementation, as the custom container implementation is accessible by default through GTK. I have confirmed this via testing.

Here is some of the code to register a custom widget with ATK:

(I've removed some of the Java typing to make it easier to read)

widgetType = G_OBJECT_TYPE (widget);
registry = atk_get_default_registry ();
factory = atk_registry_get_factory (registry, widgetType);
if (ATK_IS_NO_OP_OBJECT_FACTORY(factory)) return;

factoryName = FACTORY_TYPENAME + getTypeName(widgetType);

if (g_type_from_name (factoryName) == 0) {
        /* register the factory */
        GTypeInfo typeInfo = new GTypeInfo ();
        typeInfo.base_init = GTypeInfo_base_init_factory.getAddress ();
        typeInfo.class_size = (short)AtkObjectFactoryClass_sizeof ();
        typeInfo.instance_size = (short)AtkObjectFactory_sizeof ();
        
        info = g_malloc (GTypeInfo.sizeof);
        memmove (info, typeInfo, GTypeInfo.sizeof);
        swtFactoryType = g_type_register_static
                (ATK_TYPE_OBJECT_FACTORY(), factoryName, info, 0);
        parentType = atk_object_factory_get_accessible_type(factory);
        atk_registry_set_factory_type (registry, widgetType,
                swtFactoryType);
}


Another thing: I tried investigating with Accerciser, but it hangs and gives me the following error message:

WARNING **: AT-SPI: Error in GetItems, sender=(null), error=Did not receive a reply. Possible causes include: the remote application did not send a reply, the message bus security policy blocked the reply, the reply timeout expired, or the network connection was broken.

I would appreciate it if someone could point me in the right direction. Is the code provided correct? Is there something additional we need to be doing to register with ATK?


Thanks,

--
Eric Williams
Associate Software Engineer - Eclipse Team
Red Hat
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