To build a better world sometimes means having to tear the old one down.
-- Alexander Pierce, "Captain America: The Winter Soldier"
ATK served us well for nearly 20 years, but the world has changed, and
GTK has changed with it. Now ATK is mostly a hindrance towards improving
the accessibility stack:
- it maps to a very specific implementation, AT-SPI, which is Linux and
Unix specific
- it requires implementing the same functionality in three different
layers of the stack: AT-SPI, ATK, and GTK
- only GTK uses it; every other Linux and Unix toolkit and application
talks to AT-SPI directly, including assistive technologies
Sadly, we cannot incrementally port GTK to a new accessibility stack;
since ATK insulates us entirely from the underlying implementation, we
cannot replace it piecemeal. Instead, we're going to remove everything
and then incrementally build on a clean slate:
- add an "accessible" interface, implemented by GTK objects directly,
which describe the accessible role and state changes for every UI
element
- add an "assistive technology context" to proxy a native accessibility
API, and assign it to every widget
- implement the AT context depending on the platform
For more information, see: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/issues/2833
The position child property is problematic, since it
requires us to emit notification for all children when
inserting a child early in the list of children.
Remove the property from all ui files.
This allows to override the role declared to the atk stack. For
instance,
<accessibility>
<role type="static"/>
</accessibility>
allows to tell the accessibility stack that a label is just a message in
a message box.
Fixes#109
