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Steve Lee

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Dec 5, 2007, 3:42:02 AM12/5/07

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---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Steve Lee <st...@fullmeasure.co.uk>
Date: 4 Dec 2007 14:59
Subject: Welcome
To: ja...@googlegroups.com

I'm creating this list as it's about time I opened up Jambu a bit
more. All this talk about Open Source and I'm the only one working on
it at the moment. Many brains are better than one and there are enough
challenges now to keep several of us busy. You're in the right place
if you fancy a challenge and want to work on accessibility in Linux
(and eventually Windows).

I'm currently working on the in application code that allows direct
navigation and operation of the Firefox 3.0 user interface through
AT-SPI on Linux. We've got code to allow navigation and selection of
key interface objects. We can drive firefox with 1 or 2 USB switches
either as a standalone program or as an accerciser plugin. Scrolling
needs to be done. Text Editing simply pops up a message box for now
but will hook into an OSK or dasher for text input.

The challenge is to handle the dynamics including: popup menus,
pulldowns, dialogs, changes in enabled state and visibility and also
the Mozilla 'find' toolbar. We need design and code and a big part is
analysis of the events that Minefield generates. Menus are basically
working with some seemingly random glitches that are proving hard to
resolve. Accerciser code and even Orca is useful and following a
focus tracking design as far as we can would mean that we are well
tested territory.

It is also a matter of determining if Firefox is doing something
sensible and raising bugs if it is not. I'm getting some wide
variations in behaviour at the moment so need to stabilise that and
get consistently reproducible behaviour. This is no doubt caused by
the fact that we are driving the UI with AT-SPI doAction() and not by
mouse or keyboard and so is on untested territory. The exact order of
the events seems to vary, probably due to timing issues that need to
be sorted (for example there is no 'update complete' signal so you
need to allow for further changes).

A couple of recent regressions in the a11y of the FF nightly builds
have added to the fun.here. Another problem I have been facing is
frequent desktop lockups which are now mostly solved, especially by
running the code standalone. You can use Ctrl+Alt+F1 to find and kill
the task. The firefox team are working on various bugs and Marco the
new Mozilla a11y QA is very proactive and helpful.

Code:
Browse source: http://www.oatsoft.org/trac/jambu/browser/action_groups
SVN access: http://www.oatsoft.org/trac/jambu/

The design use GTK TreeView which use MVC. The current view is useful
for development but will be replaced with a view that performs overlay
drawing on the FF UI. Currently a simple blink rectangle shows what's
selected.