2008/11/6 Willie Walker <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>: > For me, one of the most important problems we face with WebKit is its > lack of accessibility support right now. I have a great fear that Alp > may have grossly underestimated the scope of the work. I have some > confidence, however, that the WebKit folks who were at GNOME Boston > should be able to do a decent analysis of what it will take to add it.
Hi Willie, I'm not sure what you think is being underestimated here. Instead of throwing our hands in the air and despairing at the size of the task, my company (Nuanti Ltd.) and I made the decision to make WebKit GTK+ accessibility happen early in 2008. Since then, we've been working hard to develop formal accessibility via ATK as well as improving keyboard navigation capabilities. As of November 2008, nobody else has contributed a line of code and David Bolter is the only external contributor to have even CC'd themselves on any of our WebKit GTK+ accessibility bugs. There have been no responses in those bugs to requests for testing of the patches. Two months ago, Nuanti Ltd. which does consultancy and development on WebKit even introduced a reduced rate where we set aside one developer day a week to accessibility on any WebKit-related project. One company we're working with has already accepted this sponsorship arrangement. We also have a formal testing strategy for WebKit GTK+ now which involves assessing the actual end-user accessibility of smaller non-browser applications like Devhelp and Yelp. Meanwhile, the latest ATK patchset we posted to WebKit bug #21546 also adds initial support for certain DOM events and ARIA accessibility enhancements. This work is not just being done to "tick the box". It's only now that you're mentioning you tested this patch and it didn't work for you. Clearly the functionality we're developing _does_ work for us both in the testing environment and with real-world use -- if it didn't work for you then, I don't understand why on earth you didn't take the time to mention it to the developers on the bug tracker so we could have had your issues fixed by now. Even direct personal email to the developers listed in the ChangeLog entries would be better than your complete silence that has so far been broken only when the perennial question about why the WebKit transition isn't complete yet gets raised on this mailing list. > > I so wish I wrote down all the names of the WebKit folks that were at > GNOME Boston. I'd like to follow up to see how their exploration is > coming along. It's not a question of exploration at this point but continued development to cover any missing functionality that will make the web accessible in a full-blown browser. We can make this happen but we need constructive input from developers and testers. As to your concern that this is an incredibly difficult and possibly unattainable task, I'm going to paraphrase from one of the bug reports that you aren't subscribed to: 1) The WebKit GTK+ accessibility layer reuses much of the established code that is deployed in WebKit/Mac (Safari). This greatly reduces the total amount of code we need to maintain and reduces the problem down to simply observing and adapting to the differences between their a11y SPI and ours in many places. 2) When developing the WebKit GTK+ ATK implementations we studied what was in Mozilla and GtkHTML. Mozilla's accessibility layer contains an _enormous_ amount of redundant boilerplate which we've developed some simple strategies to avoid. This is the exact same advantage that has let us develop a first-class Cairo graphics backend and Pango-based international text support without the vast resources and time it's taken in other browser engines. Our code is direct GTK+, ATK etc. and we reap the benefits of reduced complexity from this every day. The basics are already here and first class web accessibility is around the corner. It will happen sooner if we work together. I'm also very grateful to the organisation that's sponsored our extra work on the accessibility layer, even if it was just a few days on top of what we're already putting in. This kind of sponsorship (and indeed direct targeted projects on accessibility) helps the effort as a whole and has given a great morale boost in knowing that the world cares about WebKit GTK+ accessibility. Let me know if you will have the time to study the current state of the ATK and caret navigation patches (the ones in the bug tracker are a couple of weeks old) and we can start working together today and get this synced up to WebKit SVN within the week! Cheers _______________________________________________ desktop-devel-list mailing list [email protected] http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list
