Grain of Salt » Claws Mail and Users Who Are Blind

Saturday, 05 July 2008

Claws Mail and Users Who Are Blind

Category: Orca

Posted by: jd

A year ago, almost to the day, several users of Orca screen reader had expressed an interest in using Claws Mail instead of Evolution (currently the default mail client of the GNOME desktop) or Thunderbird. The Orca team is very small, but we do our best to implement the features and support requested by our users -- in addition to working on those critical features that any screen reader should have and fixing the bugs which, alas, exist. So I took a look at Claws Mail from an accessibility point of view. After all, if Claws Mail uses standard Gtk, it shouldn't be too hard to implement support in Orca.

The good news: Claws mail is (as I recall) mostly standard Gtk. Yea!

The bad news: There are a few custom widgets which are not accessible, and there is no caret navigation implemented when reading messages. These two issues prevent us from being able to implement support. Had I more time in the day, I might be able to at least generate a proof-of-concept patch for the first issue, but my current skill level is not likely such that I could implement caret navigation. So, as is custom in the open source world, I opened a couple of bugs:

And, as is sadly too often custom in the accessibility world, they languished. Until today:

It looks like nobody has been interested in implementing this feature since the end of 2007; in order to clean up the bugzilla, I'm marking this WONTFIX.

Features in Claws Mail get implemented on a developer-interest basis: if one of the core developers codes a feature, or if an external contributor provides a good patch, the feature gets added. If the feature interests nobody with coding abilities, although it seems nicer to leave old requests lingering in Bugzilla and let the submitter hope the feature will be added someday, it's more honest (and cleaner) to close them as WONTFIX.

Fail.

I suppose I should at least give the Claws Mail guys credit for being honest and stating that they're not interested in accessibility, but it is a shame for the end user.

Now back to focusing on implementing support in Orca where it belongs: on those applications whose developers ARE interested....

tags: Claws Mail, accessibility, a11y, Orca

Comments

Paul wrote:

Actually, I am still interested. A little more help and/or suggestions from you may start things moving.

Paul
(Claws Mail dev)

Posted on 07/07 at 01:43:22.

Colin wrote:

Well, it's exactly as you said: The Claws Mail team is very small, but we do our best to implement the features and support requested by our users.
And we can't do everything either...

Posted on 07/07 at 08:55:27.

jd wrote:

Understood Colin. It's not the reality of not enough resources that bothers me. Well, that does bother me. smile

But we all suffer from that problem....

What bothers me more is the (reported) lack of interest and the favoring of a "clean" WONTFIX over a messy "dang, we really do care about this problem, and it's definitely on our plate. We'll leave it open as a reminder to us, and with any luck a new community member may take it on."

Accessibility support is one of those things where each side has to meet the other half way. Mainstream developers need to make their applications accessible, and the assistive technology developers then need to take the information exposed by those applications and present it to the user in an effective fashion. If one side shrugs and walks away, it's the end user that suffers. sad

On that note, Paul, I really appreciate your reaching out. While I'm not all that familiar with Claws Mail, and am totally unfamiliar with you code, I'll check it out this evening and at least reacquaint myself with the issue. Hopefully if I poke around over the next few days I can at least identify where things are failing. Thanks!

Posted on 07/07 at 18:43:22.

Paul wrote:

jd,

any news on this? Any pointers? Any info at all?

Posted on 08/20 at 01:01:01.

jd wrote:

Hi Paul.

News: Yeah, I'm afraid our tiny team has been reduced significantly thanks to a RIF at Sun (see: http://blogs.sun.com/richb/...). sad

Losing Rich was an unexpected and painful blow. Fortunately for him and Sun, he got unrif'ed/reassigned, but he's no longer part of our team. The rest of us now are doing our best to pick up what he had been working on. I (a volunteer community contributor with a full-time day job) wound up with my fair share of additional bugs and RFEs. I honestly did try to build Claws Mail the evening I wrote my response to your comment, but I had various and sundry build dependency issues on Intrepid, and around the time I sat down to work out what they were, the rif happened. Sorry!

As for pointers....

Looking at bug #1270, Add support for caret navigation/selection: That bug is just about the fact that you cannot arrow around in the text of a message you received. While the accessibility implications of that are enormous, I don't think you need accessibility-specific tips from me at the moment. If you get caret navigation and selection working there for sighted users (i.e. if *you* can arrow around in and select text from the body of a received message via the keyboard), odds are excellent that the needed accessibility events (in this case object:text-caret-moved) will automagically be emitted by Claws Mail and Orca will in turn automagically do the right thang as a result. Mind you, it's not unheard of to find a Gtk+ app where caret nav is implemented and the corresponding caret-moved events are AWOL, but that's pretty rare in my experience.

Bug #1269, Accessibility events missing in FolderView and SummaryView: Probably a bit trickier to get to the bottom of. However, my opening report includes a number of pointers:

----------------
The FolderView and the SummaryView tables each claim to manage their descendants, which means active-descendant-changed events should be exposed to assistive technologies when the selection changes. (Please see http://www.gtk.org/api/2.6/...) These events are not being exposed. As a result assistive technologies, such as screen readers for users who are blind, cannot reliably inform the user of his/her present location within these tables.

One tool you can use to examine what events are being exposed by Claws Mail is Accerciser, which you can obtain from GNOME (http://live.gnome.org/Accer...). With event monitoring on, compare what happens when you arrow up and down in the gtk-demo tree views with what happens when you arrow up and down in FolderView and SummaryView. Additional information about accessibility can be found at the GNOME Accessibility Project (http://developer.gnome.org/...). To learn more about the Orca screen reader, please see http://live.gnome.org/Orca.

[...]
----------------

Have you had the opportunity to check out the ATK docs, Accerciser, gtk-demo, and the resources at the GNOME a11y project?

Also, I think Colin's comment on the bug (#1) is spot on:

----------------
[...] The problem probably comes from the fact the lists you mention are custom widgets that inherit from the (deprecated) GtkCTree...
----------------

In my experience standard Gtk+ widgets JustWork(tm) -- and when they don't, we file bugs against Gtk+ because things *should* JustWork. smile

So the question is what did y'all change in your custom widget to cause the standard accessibility events to not be emitted? Find the difference and potentially that'll take care of the bug -- or at least shed some light on where things need to be changed.

Anyhoo, if y'all could do something about 1270, hopefully I'll eventually get caught up on my bugs, the build issues on Intrepid will get resolved, and I'll be able to look at 1269.

Thanks again for your interest in this Paul!!

Posted on 08/21 at 15:58:28.

Paul wrote:

I believe that the Claws Mail team is even tinier than your team, but this is still within the radar, for when time allows.

Posted on 08/28 at 01:35:43.

Saturday, 05 July 2008

Claws Mail and Users Who Are Blind

Comments

Paul wrote:

Colin wrote:

jd wrote:

Paul wrote:

jd wrote:

Paul wrote:

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