I would guess that half of all treeview controls create accessibility problems. For example, gconf-editor is not accessible through Orca, because the values to be displayed are written directly to the cell renderer in the get_size callback, and never to the tree model, which is the only thing Orca reads. Also, there is no possible way to attach an accessible name or description to a cell_renderer_pixbuf. This makes programs like Synaptic unusable, since it shows the status of packages with icons.
The second problem can be dealt with fairly easily. What I did was add a "description" property to pixbuf objects. That way, programmers can do quick one-liners to add descriptions to pixbuf cells. With this change in place, I was able to make a 6-line change to Synaptic to make it accessible. With a one-line change, I was able to make gnome-app-install read the number of stars for an application, rather than just saying "icon". I've included a patch to add this property to pixbuf, and attached it to the bug report at: https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=617629 I understand the focus is all-out on Gnome 3.0 right now. Perhaps soon after, someone could look into this enhancement? The approach of making programmers keep all their visually displayed data in a treeview model sounds good, but it only happens about half the time. Programs that had mismatches to the model as recently as 3 months ago included: update-manager, gnome-app-install, gconf-editor, and many many more. Rather than trying to determine the correct value in the model to return to accessible queries, I think we should cache the data that we actually drew. If the focus is on a cell that is not visible for some reason, perhaps we could still ask it to render, thus updating the treeview data cache stored in the gail module. Such an enhancement in theory could significantly enhance accessibility throughout the space of GTK+ based applications. Thanks, Bill _______________________________________________ gnome-accessibility-list mailing list gnome-accessibility-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/gnome-accessibility-list
