[Sugar-devel] Moving to GTK3 and GObject Introspection

[Sascha Silbe]

Excerpts from Samuel Greenfeld's message of Sun Aug 07 02:41:36 +0200 2011:

> The change I would like to see in the API (if we do not have it already) is
> to ensure that we have full ATK accessibility support for all Sugar
> controls.  Not only would this allow screen readers, etc. to parse Sugar
> applications and the main window system, but it would make automated testing
> of Sugar easier as well.

The only change we need to do for accessibility support that might touch
APIs is removing hippo-canvas (there are a few places in sugar-toolkit
that use it). We're building more or less directly on GTK, so I'd expect
"accessibility" to just work in most cases or at least be fixable
without API changes.


> I've been told in the past that automating Sugar was not possible apart from
> a point & click approach because hippocanvas and similar did not expose any
> accessibility information.  Since this may require developers to setup
> additional information inside of activities (alternate names/descriptions,
> focus tab order, etc.) it is better to get this in as early as possible so
> activities do not have to be retrofitted to support ATK after the fact.

Activities can already be augmented with the necessary information
today. Those parts that use hippo-canvas can't be augmented, but will
need to be replaced soon anyway.

We had a GSoC project for an automated activity testing framework [1] a
while back. Unfortunately the student got confused by FUD about OLPC and
lost interest [2]. Nobody else stepped up to work on this project. It
uses a different technique than the accessibility based testing tools,
so not sure whether it would continue to work in GTK 3 land.

Sascha

[1] http://gsoc-sugarbot.blogspot.com/
[2] http://lists.sugarlabs.org/archive/sugar-devel/2009-March/012687.html
-- 
http://sascha.silbe.org/
http://www.infra-silbe.de/
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