We don't need as many functions to print out the property, relation, and
state of an accessible. Additionally, we should allow comparing the
accessible attributes with an expected value, and print out the real
accessible value if they do not match.
Some widgets have different roles after they are constructed, so we need
to allow changing the role defined by the class. We should still avoid
setting a role after the GtkATContext has been created.
This is a bit unfortunate, since the aria modelling
doesn't quite agree with ours, so we have to listen
for the togglebutton property change, and we inherit
the pressed state from the togglebutton accessible.
Only GtkWidget should use GTK_ACCESSIBLE_ROLE_WIDGET as its default
accessible role; the default for GtkAccessible and GtkATContext should
be GTK_ACCESSIBLE_ROLE_NONE, meaning "an element whose implicit native
role semantics will not be mapped to the accessibility API", according
to the WAI-ARIA specification.
We want to test the accessibility API, as well as the implementation
inside each widget. For that, we should expose an API that lets us
verify that a GtkAccessible has a given role, as well as a given
property.
The API follows the pattern of other GTest API:
- a macro to assert that a condition is respected
- a function that prints out the error message in case of failure
While we have split the various attributes for convenience, there's no
reason why we should have specialised data types for the attributes
container object.
Reduce the amount of subclassing, by handling collection of fundamental
types directly from the generic code paths. We now handle boolean,
tristate, integer, number, string, and relation values in the generic
code path; if an attribute supports the "undefined" value, we return the
undefined value singleton.
Drop roles and properties that were deprecated in WAI-ARIA 1.1, and add
new roles and properties defined in WAI-ARIA 1.2 and later.
We also split the relationship properties into their own enumeration, so
we can keep the GtkAccessibleProperty type more compact.
It's pointless, we can use an explicit value of `-1` everywhere.
Additionally, it complicates all code that uses the state enumeration as
an array index, since now we need to guard against a negative offset.
Some widgets have different accessible roles depending on some
parameter, so we cannot set the role at class init time. For those
widgets, we add an "accessible-role" property to GtkAccessible, and we
allow setting it (only) at construction time.
Each widget type has an accessible role associated to its class, as
roles cannot change during the life time of a widget instance.
Each widget is also responsible for creating an ATContext, to proxy
state changes to the underlying accessibility infrastructure.
An Accessible implementation must create an ATContext object. UI
elements are supposed to interact with the GtkAccessible API, but we
expose GtkATContext to allow patterns like delegation.
The ATContext type is meant to be used as the base class for
implementations of the assistive technology API—the actual mechanism
needed to communicate to components like the screen reader, or any other
AT.
Every time the widget state changes, the ATContext is meant to broadcast
the state change; and every time the AT queries the state of a UI
element, the ATContext is meant to provide that information.
We also have a "test" ATContext implementation, which is meant to be
used to write tests to verify that changes are propagated without
requiring a whole desktop session.
All accessible properties and states may have one of the following
types:
- true/false
- true/false/undefined
- true/false/mixed/undefined
- reference (to another UI element)
- reference list
- integer
- number (real numerical value)
- string
- token (one of a limited set of allowed values)
- token list
See: https://www.w3.org/WAI/PF/aria/states_and_properties#propcharacteristic_value
The GtkAccessibleValue is a simple reference counted type that can be
"subclassed" to implement each value type.
This initial commit adds GtkAccessibleValue and the basic subclasses for
plain boolean, tristate (true/false/undefined), and token types,
including statically allocated values that can be shared instead of
allocated.
GtkAccessible is an interface for accessible UI elements.
Currently, it doesn't do much except exist as a type; in the future, it
will be the entry point for all accessible state in GTK.
The list of roles is taken from the WAI-ARIA 1.2 specification:
https://w3c.github.io/aria/
Some of these roles do not make entirely sense from a GTK application
perspective, but we can remove them before finalizing the API.
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
