Peter Vágner / is on Nostr

Father, geek, sysadmin from slovakia. I like to party with friends, work with new technologies, I am relying on screen reader accessibility. I prefer open-source and self-hosted apps and services.

Keyoxide: [keyoxide.org/8df9b61a17bf88354…](https://keyoxide.org/8df9b61a17bf88354842ecc5144312f3eb650a2d )

Last Notes

2024-06-18 15:00:57

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Yesterday I was running newton all day long. And all these tests were made with it. Today I am back to stable versions so far as I had to deal with inaccessible website about a hour ago.
I don't want to sound rude in any way but if I was able to do a little recap I can point out these issues related to newton prototype:<li>I am afraid there might be some invisible content present when using flat review.</li><li>Expanded or collapsed state is not passed through to orca (tested with fractal room list)</li><li>When running GTK4 from the accesskit branch, there are issues selecting GTK2 and electron based apps in the alt+tab window chooser.</li>
These are the things I am aware of.
If you need me to test something more thoroughly, please do let me know and I will try to do my best.

2024-06-17 20:46:39

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I took a look at more apps that have lists as their integral part. Audio player #amberol has a playlist where its list items would benefit from calculated accessible names. gnome-podcasts looks as if it's already doing what we need the items have all the text from their children. I haven't looked how they are doing it though. Various lists within the gnome control center would also benefit from the accessible name calculation as an alternative to setting accessible manually. For example list of wifi networks is missing state information and signal strength. List of bluetooth devices is missing the state information. List of apps under notifications is missing a status information. List of keyboard shortcuts is missing assigned shortcuts, only action names are part of the accessible name. List of printers has all the details including status, location, description. Actually this might be the only list I am surprised looks about right to me. Hmm, perhaps I shal try to collect all these comments and submit it as a GTK feature request as calculating the labels might really be helpfull it seems.

2024-06-17 18:05:19

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Hmmm, so it's even more complicated than I was imagining. I think what is done within the nautilus files view is not entirely right either. At the other hand projects with good a11y reputation such as thunderbird are doing it too. Thunderbird has aria-label on its message list items too. When looking at nautilus window with flat review or object navigation all the textual information is there. If using it the way it has been designed just using standard navigation keys such as arrow keys it's looking very poor.

2024-06-17 13:56:48

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Yes with fractal this is the only issue that has left.
Related to the other thing that is not related to fractal Now I managed to find out downgrading GTK4 to the 4.14.4 as packaged in arch linux it helps with electron and GTK2 based apps not being focusable through the alt+tab window chooser.
Also have you noticed my post regarding nautilus and accessible name calculation I have posted to the orca list? This is not related to your work in any way so far. I am just wondering if accesskit wouldn't be able to make this part better than what we currently have while using atspi directly. In other words while calculating label of an accessible node should it walk its entire subtree?

2024-06-17 07:32:56

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I managed to update. I can no longer reproduce freezes of fractal I mentioned yesterday and I can recognize the labels related change. Thank you so much.

2024-06-16 20:33:16

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Thank you again, I've great news this time as well. After updating the newton_atspi_compat package the flat review with newton is working fine. With nautilus it started to work immediatelly when I've restarted orca with the updated newton_atspi_compat package in place. With fractal it started to work after restarting fractal.
Also I must say I have found my-self reporting a strange thing yesterday. I have mentioned I have tried gedit as a part of this testing however now I have realized gedit is a GTK3 app not GTK4.
When looking at gedit main window I can use orca's flat review to explore its toolbar including moving the mouse pointer and synthesizing mouse clicks. When doing the same thing with GTK4 apps such as nautilus or fractal the flat review is working great but emulating the mouse is not.
Excuse me for this mistake. I got it wrong.
And just now I have noticed another thing. I wanted to verify the mouse emulation features by running gtk-demo app which is GTK3 app too. I have tried to run gtk-demo from the gnome-terminal. As it has started I have noticed orca briefly reporting GTK demo however I can't focus its window. When holding down the alt key and pressing the tab key to cycle through the open windows, I can hear GTK Demo is part of the window switcher but when releasing both the keys that window is never brought to the foreground. When expanding activities from the gnome top pannel I can't locate GTK demo either. The very same thing has happened to me with an electron based app called losslesscut but originally I have assumed that was a momentarily thing related to electron but now when seeing it for the second time with a different toolkit I am wondering if this might be related to the mutter changes.
I am sorry for mentioning too many things. For some of these I am really unsure so if it's not relevant please ignore those parts.

2024-06-16 18:08:09

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Hmmm, I can't really think of what else to try. I will also rebuild the same version of GTK4 their are shipping on arch linux out of interest just in case.

2024-06-16 17:05:40

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I apologize for the delay.
Good news first:<li>text review and text selection for GTK labels is now working on both atspi and accesskit respectivelly. Huge thanks!</li><li>Restarting orca while GTK4 app such as nautilus, gnome-calculator or fractal is in the foreground is now safe. I see no more exceptions when releasing keygrabs on exit.</li><li>This is true from the moment I have started testing this yesterday I have just forgotten to mention it. When key echo is enabled in orca with newton it correctly handles accented non ascii characters while typing. I have tested web content in firefox and chromium, gnome-terminal, libreoffice, gedit, nautilus and fractal.</li>
And now the rest:<li>After todays orca update flat review now just displays window title for me for example name of the folder that is opened in nautilus. I think I have updated everything correctly but I can double check it later today.</li><li>Reporting expanded / collapsed state is really an accesskit integration issue I am afraid as switching to atspi on the same GTK4 version I am getting these reported fine.</li><li>Before starting this yesterday I was using GTK4 4.14.4 as packaged in archlinux. That version has some positive and some negative changes as well than the version you have started with while integrating accesskit. For example the thing with conversation history in fractal I have mentioned in my previous report is broken with GTK4 4.14.4 as packaged in arch linux but it's working fine with both atspi and accesskit when using your branch. Thus I think it's not related to your work. At the other hand in fractal there is a message composer which has some buttons that inwoke a popup menu such as more options. When that menu is dismissed fractal freezes with atspi and accesskit when using GTK4 built from your branch and with the arch linux packaged GTK4 version it's working fine.</li>

2024-06-16 13:02:36

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Thanks for the updates. I'm rebuilding now. I'll report back soon.

2024-06-16 11:33:02

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So I am back testing fractal and trying to compare how it performs with atspi and accesskit.<li>Fractal has tree of conversations on the main window. Root entries are room types such as explore, invited, favorite, low priority and similar. These items might have expanded / collapsed state. With accesskit this state is not yet reported.</li><li>When GTK4 label is focused, it's possible to use arrow keys to navigate with the caret on that label. With atspi orca is reporting caret navigation and text selection as it happens. With accesskit this is not yet working. I am not sure this might be an issue with the accesskit, newton prototype though, because with older versions of GTK4 this was not working either. Where can I put that environment variable to force atspi even with accesskit based build of GTK4? I am running this on the full gnome 46.</li><li>There is another reason why I think there might be difference with the GTK4 version I am running against atspi as compared to accesskit. Fractal has a list of room events called room history. Those are messages, files, recordings and other items found on the rooms timeline. With atspi this list is reported as room history and using up and down arrow key to navigate in this list does not cause orca to report items in this list as they are being focused. With accesskit this list is working perfectly.</li><li>With accesskit flat review is working in much more places including nautilus and fractal. With atspi orca freezes when trying to use flat review with these apps.</li><li>Flat review with accesskit feels damn snappy. Unfortunately I don't know how to prove it and make sure if it's for real or if this is a part of me being so much excited. Perhaps some control coordinates may need some refining or orca needs to be tweaked to the new way of doing things as the content now appears to be mostly presented on very long lines when using flat review. And also I think there might be some invisible content being presented as a part of flat review.</li>

2024-06-16 01:56:09

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Fractal is very accessible on linux. They have specifically addressed accessibility issues in few recent releases. I think there are things to improve e.g. autocomplete of mentions, but I think the app is generally accessible and nice to use.

2024-06-16 01:34:56

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Regarding windows that sounds fantastic. I imagine I might be able to recommend windows folks to run #fractal matrix client soon enough.
For building GTK with accesskit on windows do you use msis2 or gvsbuild?

2024-06-16 00:56:51

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Yes, I made it work by rebuilding affected @npub13yw…77zg packages from your branches. Flat review, key echo, mouse actions are working fine with GTK4 apps such as gnome-calculator, gnome settings and similar. Even at this stage it's perfectly useable. Another bonus, The accesskit based GTK4 is also going to provide accessibility on windows. Am I understanding that right?
Things I have noticed so far:
* With at-spi2 based GTK4 GTK labels are mapped to the label role. With accesskit based implementation it's mapped to static.
* In nautilus when typing into the address bar with at-spi based implementation auto completions are reported as they are inserted. So text insertions / deletions are not yet available with accesskit I guess.
* When restarting orca and nautilus is the active window this newton based orca causes nautilus to freeze I guess.
Once again thanks for your dedication and awesome work.