Just a reminder, the next GNOME hackfest will start in a little more than a week. As usual, we are organizing it on the wiki, but in summary, the tasks that will be the basis for the debate are managed by bug BG#638537.
As I explained on my previous post, the objective of this hackfest is a kind of ATK 2.0 kick off. ATK has served well during these years, but was mostly unchanged during almost ten years. After all these years it is time to use the experience from implementors and AT developers to improve it.
New sponsors
We have confirmed new sponsors to this hackfest, joining the original ones, GNOME Foundation and Igalia: GPUL and Xunta de Galicia.
GPUL supports the ATK HackFest organizing an open session about accessibility. GPUL also provides economical support. This contributions is possible thanks to the budget from the agreement between Galician Free Software Asociations and the Xunta de Galicia (Galician Regional Goverment) in 2011
In related news:
One important new from the last a11y weekly meeting.
One of the drawbacks of at-spi2 was that due lack of resources, there wasn’t any plan to create a replacement for C-SPI. That means that only pyatspi2 was available, so any AT tool that wanted to interact with at-spi2 was supposed to be written using python (note that I’m talking about the AT side, application accessibility support based on ATK is still mainly written in C).
This has changed, as one of the last changes made by Mike Gorse on how the python bindings are created is write a core C library, and use gobject introspection. So now any AT developer has libatspi available. It is not API compatible with C-SPI, and it is not planned a compatibility layer, but at least now it is in theory possible to write an AT tool in C, and any existing one would require to migrate to it.
The next step would be improve libatspi documentation, in order to upload that to GNOME developer documentation page.