This week I’ve been hacking a while around Dogtail. It’s a Python library intended for implementation of functional tests of applications providing accessibility support through AT-SPI. It lets you check and manipulate the user interface from Python scripts, and it’s easy to integrate it into test cases.
While I was working, I found that I could not easily browse tabs in a GtkNotebook using dogtail. This issue has been reported in Gnome bugzilla (bug report). The problem is:
- Dogtail uses Python SPI bindings (in project pyspi) to access the accessibility layer. This bindings are a direct wrapper over CSPI.
- GtkNotebook accessibility implementation has the page tab list role, and the tabs have the page tab role. The notebook exposes the currently selected tab through the Selection interface. It lets you specify a selection of children of an accessible container.
- Unfortunately neither Python SPI bindings nor Dogtail provide support for this. Then it’s not easy to change the currently active tab of a notebook.
I’m not the only one that has detected the problem this way. Peter Johanson has sent two bugs and patches to solve the issue and add tab browsing support in Dogtail (report in Pyspi and report in Dogtail). In parallel I was developing similar patches. As Peter Johansons’ are more complete, I’ve simply added some functionalities this morning to the dogtail patch to provide an easier way to use the selection interface in Dogtail. I’ve uploaded the new patch to the Dogtail bug report.
Now you can simply write:
focus.application('gedit')
focus.widget(roleName='page tab', name='My tab')
focus.widget.node.select()
And it raises the desired tab easily. Hope those patches go upstream. I think they're a good solution for the tab browsing issue.