Frankencode

Its been a long time coming, but about a fortnight ago we did the first release of AT-SPI2, the D-Bus port of our Linux accessibility framework. As mentioned in the notes the release had a warning label.

‘DANGER: Development release - may cause psychological harm’

Overall though I’ve been very pleased with the work we’ve achieved so-far. I have not been funded to work on the project for six months now, but I’ve found time to fix a few bugs, and most importantly help out those who want to get involved. I never really believed Linus “Release early, release often”, but it turns out that he  was right. Since the software has had an official release we’ve had a good number of people providing patches and generally poking at it.

Thanks go to Mario Lang, Stephen Shaw, Halim Sahin and others who have tried things out. Its been extremely useful. Mario especially finding a couple of serious bugs.

We still have a long way to go, but the end has been in sight ever since the hack-fest in Dublin. We need to get the cspi port up-to-date, help Mike Gorse work through the issues regarding reference count removal and fix bugs, lots of bugs. With EDS quickly shifting to D-Bus Gnome is well on the way to ORBit removal. A11y and GConf shouldn’t be far behind.

Thank-you to Felix Kaser for pointing out Mark Shuttleworth’s interview with derStandard.at. It was an incredibly interesting read. While at the GCDS this year I made many guesses about the Ubuntu opinion on Gnome Shell and the plans for 3.0. They, as the largest distributor of a consumer linux desktop, have the most to lose or gain from the awesome 3.0 plans.

The part of the interview that struck me directly was Mark’s opinion on what is missing from our proposals:

“Well initially there was a lot of discussions about something that was much less visual which is how files are organized and I even blogged about it. I think actually that could be a bigger  improvement in the every-day user experience of the GNOME desktop”

I don’t know about Mark, but I was surrounded by people who are desperate to solve this type of problem at GCDS. Rob Taylor & Philip Van Hoof were both present and really pushing tracker as a a usable, fast data-store for desktop metadata. I attended Thursdays ontology BoF with the two of them. Mark is right, this is generally an unsexy problem. People who missed the ‘Nature of e-mail containers’ conversation on Thursday afternoon avoided the GCDS nadir of boredom.

The real problems of how we present this to our users is still to come, and its much more difficult than providing a fast data-store or getting consensus on what the meta-data should look like. Still, its the sexy, exciting part where we should be able to get everyone involved. Mark may be surprised by how many at Codethink and elsewhere in the community are working on replacing the awful file-system metaphor for data organization. Obviously we haven’t done enough to get his attention yet, but that could change soon. (Small secret) Codethink should be putting resources into a demo app over the coming months for the purpose of showing off some cool new technologies, including the new Tracker. Wait for a blog post from Rob Taylor for the full details.

Last week I attended a week-long meeting at the Sun offices in Dublin. The purpose of the trip was to hammer out issues with the D-Bus AT-SPI port, so that everyone can feel more confident about its readiness for Gnome 3.0.

What a great week we ended up having. I should first say thanks to all that attended, Willie Walker, Mike Gorse, Li Yuan, Ke Wang, Brad Taylor, and Rob Taylor. Sun, Novell & Codethink also need thanking. They paid for everyone to be there, some flying from China, with no foundation money involved. The Gnome community is extremely lucky to have Willie devoting his time to accessibility. I dread to think what Gnome a11y would be like without his organization and direction

Willie organized the event, I imagine more out of fear at what he found in the D-Bus AT-SPI code-base than anything else. All told I think everyone was pleasantly surprised. The project will take a-lot of work to get to the level of maturity required, but loads has already been done. What is required of us for Gnome 3.0 isn’t our of our reach.

We started the week with a very brief overview of the design for AT-SPI D-Bus. Only Mike and I had much experience with the project and we wanted to get everyone up to speed.  This very quickly turned into a Q&A session and we figured out what the main issues were on Monday afternoon. Tuesday was spent on the important task of checking the D-Bus protocol specification against both the code and the IDL spec. This bought up a number of bugs, issues and improvements. It was well worthwhile. Amazingly Wednesday & Thursday were spent hacking by everyone, which is a great feat considering that four of us had only peeked at the code previously. So much got done. Orca is now running with a fair degree of success and we can move on to performance issues and application-specific bugs. For a full run-down of the still-to-dos and what-got-dones take a look at the weeks wiki.

Dublin

Outside of work was great fun also. Dublin really is a beautiful city. Lots of green spaces nice buildings and extremely friendly people. The business park is pretty swanky also, and luckily the Oracle buildings are across the road from Sun. We went out to eat and drink in Temple bar, which apparently isn’t a bar. Wednesday involved a trip to the very very small Novell offices in Dublin. They are a way out of town, Brad and I were lucky to get there at all given the distinct lack of signs and road-names that have changed since Google scraped them. We met up with Alan McGovern, a Moonlight hacker, and along with a meal and a few drinks geeked the night away.  Alberto Ruiz took us all out for a nice meal on Thursday night. I forget where it was. You’ll have to ask him for the recommendation. Later we attended the Sun Pub Quiz. Luckily for me, our arrival was just as the Quiz part was ending. I’m not so good with the questions.

Me for 3.0

What am I doing for 3.0 I hear you ask? I’m sure you didn’t but I’m going to blurt it out anyway. I’ll be finding time any-where I can to work on D-Bus accessibility. Codethink has already dedicated lots of my time to the project, and there may be a little more in the future. The accessibility plan looks a little sketchy in the road-map, but I believe that with some hard work it can become a big success for the big release.

After ranting about my work I’d love to hear what everyone else us up-to. There must me more than a few semi-secret 3.0 charges taking place.

Many thanks to racarr for posting about this earlier today.  I had seen posts on the ‘Do-ifying’ of GTK but they had passed me by. ‘Do-ifying’ applications is a fantastic idea. We shouldn’t limit ourselves to GTK apps though.

The bit that caught my interest was that racarr was thinking of exposing a UI heirarchy over D-Bus to allow Gnome Do to find key-bindings and make them available. I suggested that AT-SPI would be a better way to do this, as all key-bindings are already exposed. I come to no conclusions over whether A11y is the best way. I’m biased. It did get me thinking about how A11y technologies could be used to provide general application assistance with Gnome Do.

Context sensitive ‘Do’ commands

Orca, the gnome screen reader, uses a11y mainly by responding to ‘focus’ events which are emitted when input focus moves to a new widget. Gnome Do could use ‘focus’ events to provide context-sensitive commands. By knowing which application, and which part of an application the user is currently focused on it might be possible to provide a more tailored selection of commands.

Perhaps the choice of ‘Do’ commands for each application would depend on finding out what D-Bus interfaces it supports.

Application generated ‘Do’ commands

Obviously for application generated commands we need methods of exposing these to Gnome Do. My preference would be to do this via D-Bus, which again a11y could help with. All ATs (Assistive technologies) need to know when new accessible applications appear on the desktop. Towards this end, D-Bus AT-SPI has a daemon that acts as an application registry and informs ATs when new applications are added. This registry could be made more generic so that Gnome Do would listen for new applications and register their ‘Do’ commands when they are started.

I can’t describe the registration interface here. I don’t know Gnome Do. I’m imagining a list of actions with a command name and descriptions, but it could well be much much more complicated.

Key Bindings

As racarr suggests, it should be possible to inspect the applications UI hierarchy to find all the key bindings and present them and their descriptions to Gnome Do. GOK, the gnome on screen keyboard, already does something VERY similar to this by inspecting an application and presenting all the actions of the currently focused window in a simple manner. There may be other things we can infer from the UI hierarchy, but I wouldn’t want to get too ambitious here.

I’ve often thought that a11y technology was under utilized. As applications on our desktop are already merging together a little by providing and accessing more D-Bus services, a11y seems like it could be well placed to enable some really innovate interfaces for the general user. If this happens it could really help experiences for accessibility users too. More bugs fixed, more descriptions added to widgets with key-bindings.