Hi Peter, Drake: Although I agree with what Peter wrote, I think there are at least two other things to consider. One is that if there is an onscreen visual indication of which column is being used for sort order, in a GUI (and there usually is), then that visual indication should somehow be reflected in the ATK/AT-SPI state of the relevant column header. In some interfaces this may be implied by existing state, i.e. if a header has STATE_TOGGLED it may be the 'sort order' header. In Thunderbird using the theme I am currently looking at, sort order (and whether 'forward' or 'reverse') is indicated via a visible 'arrow' or triangle onscreen. It seems to me that this arrow should either be explicitly exposed or, more likely, its presence should be exposed via a semantic STATE. It could also be exposed as an ATK 'object attribute' as Peter suggests below. In this case it seems clear that the visible headers's state information should include this bit of semantic info, whether or not the actual list also includes such sort-order information in its attributes. I also think that the ATK_RELATION_CONTROLLER_FOR/ATK_RELATION_CONTROLLED_BY reciprocal pair may be appropriate in this context, since the header 'button' effectively becomes a sort-order controller for the list when clicked.
Best regards, Bill Peter Parente wrote: > Hi Drake, > > I don't know of an explicit field in atk/AT-SPI for exposing sort > order on a widget such as a tree. However, it seems like the > weakly-typed object attributes feature might work here for someone > wishing to expose that information. See the following two links: > > http://developer.gnome.org/doc/API/2.0/atk/AtkObject.html#atk-object-get-attributes > http://www.gnome.org/~billh/at-spi-idl/html/classAccessibility_1_1Accessible.html#a8 > > What I don't know is if there is some established convention for what > the name should be on the attribute or what enumeration should be used > for the value. What we want to avoid is a proliferation of synonyms > across applications and toolkits. For instance, "sortorder:ascending", > "sort-order:forward", "order:down", and all possible permutations. > > The AT-SPI link above suggest the use of attributes names/values from > already established namespaces such as W3C specs and the Dublin Core. > If others agree that object attributes are the way to go, then > following an established standard is the right thing to do here. > > Pete > _______________________________________________ > Gnome-accessibility-devel mailing list > [email protected] > http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/gnome-accessibility-devel > _______________________________________________ Gnome-accessibility-devel mailing list [email protected] http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/gnome-accessibility-devel
