Hi folks, I'd like to propose the creation of a wiki to support the discussion and documentation of "best practices" for applications which expose information through atk/at-spi. The idea is to have a place for existing atk developers to document how they make their standard widgets accessible and, more importantly, to provide a reference for new developers just starting to enable their applications. The goal is to avoid a proliferation of different uses of atk across applications and toolkits such that at-spi ATs only have to deal with one design per widget, or, at worst, a few with minor discrepancies.
For instance, it would be nice to avoid different event orderings, detail1/detail2 field usage, and layouts of the accessible hierarchy in Firefox, OpenOffice, gtk, Qt, etc. tree widgets. As far as I can tell nothing in the atk/at-spi spec suggests, for tree table widgets, which interfaces should be implemented (though this may be obvious), when events should be fired, in what order they should be fired, what data they should carry, how the accessible objects should be arranged in the hierarchy, what roles non-trivial tree table cells should have (e.g. check boxes in cells), what object attributes an AT might expect to find, and so on. The wiki could give recommendations for all of these cases based on community consensus. Hopefully, making such information easily accessible would encourage developers to avoid making completely arbitrary decisions when they encounter a weakly specified use of the API. I know that Sun has published some initial documentation on gnome.org concerning atk in GNOME applications. A wiki could turn those pages into living documents and allow them to grow over time to encompass more widgets, more toolkits, changing uses of atk, and new atk/at-spi features. Of course, the wiki would probably start with pages about the basic gtk widgets and how gail makes them accessible today as a baseline. Even this basic information might help the KDE folks get started down a similar path for Qt. Over time, it could probably grow to encompass more complex topics like the new-atk implementation for documents in Firefox. Obviously, the wiki would have to have some organization for documenting widget classes, implementations, and attributes, but those details could be gradually decided upon over time. For now, I'd just like to hear what the community thinks about the idea. Would anyone contribute to such a wiki? Does anyone see a downside to encouraging the community at large to discuss atk best practices? Do people think this would improve the quality of application accessibility or hinder it? Let me hear your thoughts. We can discuss the idea further at the Boston Summit if it proves interesting to more than me alone. :) Thanks, Pete _______________________________________________ gnome-accessibility-list mailing list gnome-accessibility-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/gnome-accessibility-list
