By Alejandro Piñeiro Iglesias. In GNOME, accessibility is a core value that touches all aspects of the system. [1] From the infrastructure, to the graphical toolkit, to the applications, to the assistive technologies, accessibility has been a central consideration from the very early days. On April 2011 GNOME 3.0 was released, and although GNOME and the accessibility made a huge effort, the accessibility support was not ideal. But not are bad news. Finally the accessibility technologies are starting to be used from the two main free desktops. AT-SPI is starting to be used on KDE distros, and Orca is starting to be functional with Qt apps. Since GNOME 3.0 a big effort was done in order to improve the situation. At the moment of this proposal writing an ATK/AT-SPI2 hackfest is being organized, in order to fix the issues from the framework itself. The purpose of this presentation is explaining: * Introduce accessibility on GNOME. * Briefly explain the status towards GNOME 3.4 * Summarize the output of the ATK/AT-SPI2 hackfest * Compare GNOME 3.0 vs GNOME 3.4 * KDE status and cooperation * Future [1] http://library.gnome.org/devel/accessibility-devel-guide/nightly/gad-how-it-works.html.en

1. GNOME 3.4 accessible:
Status, news, future
Alejandro Piñeiro (apinheiro@igalia.com)

2. Hey guy, this room is called
CrossDesktop Devroom,
you know?

3. Let's try it again ...

4. CrossDesktop
accessibility: GNOME and
others
Alejandro Piñeiro (apinheiro@igalia.com)

5. Introduction, terms and
stuff

6. Accessibility?
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Means remove barriers to access
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Related to universal design
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We want a product usable to the greatest extent
possible by everyone

7. Examples please
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Visual-only user interfaces
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Fixed display sizes or styles
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Audio or Video-only prompts
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Dependance on mouse, multi-key gestures

8. What can we do?
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Programs require to provide:
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Programmatic access
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Keyboard navigation
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Themes
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Etc.

9. Accessibility? Why?
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It increases your user base
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It helps you address accessibility guidelines
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It's the right thing to do

10. The long road to crossdesktop
(Some history)

11. At the Dawn of Time
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16 Oct 2000, “GNOME Accessibility Summit”
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Sun, IBM and others joined the party
Accessibility had a really big push
A lot of new stuff 2000-2005
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ATK, AT-SPI, Gail, Gnopernicus, LSR

12. That old GNOME 2.0

13. So, why just GNOME?
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Well, Sun had enough with GNOME
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KDE people were also interested but …
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AT-SPI was based on CORBA
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At that time CORBA/Bonobo were “stars” technologies at GNOME
KDE didn't like too much CORBA ...

14. … in fact
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Seems that nobody liked CORBA/Bonobo
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GNOME decided to deprecate it on 2007
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Accessibility community worried
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Mail from Ariel Rios, May 2007
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http://mail.gnome.org/archives/release-team/2007-May/msg00030.html
Boston Summit 2007

15. DBUS is coming
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DBUS is the new and shiny IPC
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But this port is not something trivial
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That would require a good amount of resources
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Resources, now that you mention that word ...

16. Bad times
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1 Jun 2007, IBM “change strategies”
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LSR dies (Orca survives)
27 Jan 2010, Sun is acquired by Oracle
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Sun decreasing workforce is mostly removed
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Willie Walker stops to be a11y leader and Orca
co-maintainer
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Orca survives as a community-driven project

17. There are still some hope...
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Codethink starts AT-SPI2, funded initially by Nokia
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Developer: Mark Doffman
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http://blog.floopily.org/2008/04/23/codethink-d-bus-based-accessibility/
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Then other contributions from Novell or OpenSuse
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Right now is mostly volunteer-driven
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AT-SPI2 not “functional enough” until 2010

18. The past is boring! What
happens now?

19. GNOME 3.X

20. GNOME 3.0
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GNOME 3.0 was a challenge
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New toolkits like Clutter
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Major updates on old toolkits, Gtk3
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New Desktops: GNOME Shell, Unity
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Gsettings VS Gconf
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New AT-SPI2 (major component)
etc
CSUN 2010 Accessibility Summit

21. GNOME 3.2
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Stabilization of the resulting 3.0 stack
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Now with a real environment
Working on the functional regressions
Some new features
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GNOME Shell on-screen-keyboard
Built-in magnifier
ATK-AT/SPI2 hackfest 2011

22. KDE

23. AT-SPI2 is DBUS based
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So, KDE became accessible ?
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No: qt-bridge required a lot of work
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Frederik Gladhorn retake the work on Qt and the
bridge on 2011
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http://labs.qt.nokia.com/2011/04/01/not-yet-accessible/
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http://labs.qt.nokia.com/2011/08/23/accessibility-on-linux/

24. Is something working?
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Right now things start to works
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People started to poulish apps, like Kate or Unity
2D
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Still not fully functional, but almost

25. We love Accessible Tools!
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GNOME has Orca, lets start Korka!
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Eeemmm, … why?
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KDE people are testing all the stuff with Orca
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Remember: cross-desktop! Reuse stuff!!
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Note: probably Orca would require some kind of Qt GUI

26. XFCE

27. Status
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Thanks to be GTK+ based, XFCE is largely
accessible
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The tricky part is getting accessibility enabled
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Current accessibility stack is really GNOME-alike
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They included accessibility on his roadmap
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http://wiki.xfce.org/releng/4.10/roadmap/accessibility

28. So, what we have here?
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Most big distros includes GNOME, KDE and XFCE
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Users will soon be able to get three accessible(ish)
desktop environment
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This would mean more testing and feedback
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Still some work required on how enable accessibility

29. Future

30. GNOME 3.4
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Like 3.2: working on stabilization and performance
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New features:
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Zoom dialog
Brightness and Contrast functionality
More ATK support for GNOME Shell

31. ATK/AT-SPI2 Hackfest

32. ATK/AT-SPI2 Hackfest
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People from GTK, ATK, AT-SPI2, Mozilla, WebkitGTK,
Qt
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Conclusions:
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Still a lot of work to do
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Not a lot of people
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Still a lot of questions without answer
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Stop to use the bridge as a module/plugin => 3.6

33. A summary?

34. Current status
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We have an accessibility framework
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We already have users
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But: Not enough ATs or people
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Bus factor of one in several cases
What we need: improve the base, more ATs, more
people

35. Questions?