Matthias: A few comments.
> (ccing Kjartan, since he did the last few gnome-canvas releases) > > At the Gnome summit, Bill Haneman approached Owen and me again about > moving the a11y implementation from gail into GTK+. This was discussed a > number of times already, but it never happened. We hope to achieve a > number of things by this move: > > - Make a11y implementations a more integral part of the process of > adding new interfaces to GTK+. > > - Giving a11y implementations access to internal GTK+ apis > > - Sharing the maintenance cost among a larger group of people Yes, this is a good idea. I think quite a few gail implementations have some performance issues because sometimes it is not so effective to get the information via GTK+ API's. For example, table row moves are handled as delete and then add events, so the fact that the operation was actually a move is lost. Things like this would probably be easier, faster, and cleaner to implement directly in GTK+. > There are a number of obstacles to this: > > - gail currently has a gnome-canvas dependency My understanding is that the gnome-canvas code was put in gail for convenience (to avoid having a separate ATK implementation library for GTK+ and libgnomecanvas0.. The gnome-canvas code probably should move into libgnomecanvas directly just like the GTK+ implementations are moving into GTK+. Sounds like this is what you plan on doing. > - besides the module, gail installs a small library of utility functions Yes, these are designed to make it easier to implement the ATK functions for those widgets that implement AtkText. I think all GTK+ text widgets use these common functions. It would probably make sense for these to become GTK+ interfaces since they hide a lot of the ugliness of implementing AtkText. > The rough plan we agreed on is this: > > 1) move the canvas a11y implementation to gnome-canvas to remove > the gnome-canvas dependency from the gail module > > 2) move the gail module into the GTK+ tarball as a separate module > > 3) move a11y implementations from the module into GTK+ itself > > > This plan does not cover the gail utility library mentioned earlier, > maybe we want to deprecate it in favor of some a11y utility functions > inside GTK+ itself. > > Bill agreed to look into the first step. Once that is done, I'll be > willing to work on 2). The last step is something that can be done > incrementally over time, it doesn't have to happen in one step. > > I think it is quite possible to get 1) and 2) done in time for the next > GTK+ release - the first step should probably be kept on a gnome-canvas > branch until it is clear if the next GTK+ release will be ready in time > for Gnome 2.18. There are certainly other compatibility concerns that I > have not thought about... > > Comments ? > > Matthias > > > > _______________________________________________ > Gnome-accessibility-devel mailing list > [email protected] > http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/gnome-accessibility-devel _______________________________________________ Gnome-accessibility-devel mailing list [email protected] http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/gnome-accessibility-devel
