== Purpose Accerciser (http://live.gnome.org/Accerciser) is an interactive Python accessibility explorer for the GNOME desktop. It uses AT-SPI to inspect and control widgets, allowing a developer to check if an application is providing correct information to assistive technologies and automated test frameworks. Accerciser has a simple plugin framework which developers can use to create custom views of accessibility information.
In essence, Accerciser is a next generation at-poke tool (http://svn.gnome.org/viewcvs/at-poke). The primary features of Accerciser are the following: * ORBit, not cspi, based. Like the modern LSR and Orca screen readers, Accerciser uses pyORBit to talk AT-SPI with other applications. The legacy cspi module is avoided. * Plugin architecture. Create a Python module, drop it in a folder, and have it load as a plugin pane with full access to AT-SPI and the selected element in the accessibility tree view. * Interface browser and event monitor plugins. All the features you've come to expect from at-poke, and then some. * IPython console plugin. A full, interactive Python shell with access to the accessible object selected in the tree view; all AT-SPI interfaces, methods and attributes; and any other Python modules. Supports autocompletion and a million other niceties thanks to IPython. * API browser plugin. Shows the interfaces, methods, and attributes available on the selected accessible object. * Global hotkeys. Move the tree view quickly to the last focused accessible or the one under the mouse pointer. Insert a marker into the event monitor log for easy identification at a later time. * Customizable UI layout. Move plugin tabs to different panels or even separate windows to view them concurrently. * Accessibility. Accerciser does not disable its own accessibility. * Yelp documentation. Included in the package. * Python powered. Although the version number is only at 0.1.0, Accerciser is quite usable for its intended purpose. == Target Accerciser is being proposed for the developer tools module set. == Dependencies Accerciser relies on modules already included in GNOME releases. There are no new dependencies. The list of required modules includes the following: python >= 2.4 gnome-python-desktop >= 2.14 (for libwnck) bonobo >= 2.12 pyORBit >= 2.14 pygtk >= 2.8 (for gtk and libglade) at-spi >= 1.7 == Resource usage Accerciser is already hosted in GNOME's subversion repository. The first tarball release is posted on GNOME's FTP server and future releases will follow suit. We are currently tracking Accerciser bugs in a component of the separate LSR project, but have requested an independent module for Accerciser. All bugs will be transfered when the new module becomes available. == Adoption Ubuntu has created a LaunchPad page at http://code.launchpad.net/~revu/+branch/accerciser/ubuntu which seems to indicate they are working on distribution of Accerciser in Feisty. == GNOME-ness and community = Internationalization All human-readable strings are marked for translation. Our autotools process is configured to build and install translations for strings in the code as well as our Docbook help files (see below). We recently contacted the GNOME i18n team to ask them to begin translations of the project. = Documentation We have created Docbook help following the template maintained by the GNOME Documentation Project. The documentation is viewable with Yelp and accessible from the Help menu in the Accerciser program. In addition to the static help document, we are in the process of creating a number of tutorial screencasts demonstrating the use of Accerciser (http://live.gnome.org/Accerciser#tutorials). Written tutorials about extending Accerciser with plugins will follow. = Look and feel Accerciser uses gtk+ widgets to fit in with the look and feel of the desktop as a whole. At present, we use the icons installed with glade3 to represent the roles of widgets in the Accerciser tree view. However, the available icons are not an exact match for the AT-SPI widget roles (http://www.gnome.org/~billh/at-spi-idl/html/namespaceAccessibility.html#a216) nor do they cover all of the available roles. A graphic artist is in the process of creating icons matching the AT-SPI roles exactly. We have requested that he create the icons following the Tango Desktop guidelines (http://tango.freedesktop.org/Tango_Desktop_Project). When complete, the icons will be packaged with Accerciser. = Preferences Version 0.2.0 of Accerciser will store preferences using gconf. Support for gconf is already in trunk. = Accessibility Developers with disabilities are part of our target audience for Accerciser. We have taken initial steps to ensure the tool is accessible with Linux Screen Reader (http://live.gnome.org/LSR). We have plans to more rigorously evaluate the use of Accerciser with LSR in order to correct any accessibility problems (http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=422164). We may also create a script for LSR to make the core Accerciser plugins more usable with this screen reader. _______________________________________________ desktop-devel-list mailing list desktop-devel-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list