Accessibility/2012CorePicture

What is this?

This is a list of ongoing activities in core of Mozilla accessibility project 2011-2012.

We have a plan

64bit support

Meta bug: bug 646484.

Target: Q1

Known problems:

1. unique ID generation bug 606080

Performance

Meta bug: bug 531850.

Target: Q4-Q1.

Key problems:

1. table indices getting, bug 570995
2. smart eventing (don't process and don't emit events until there's consumer)
   1. on windows: bug 644103
   2. on linux: bug 420722

Data mining

Target: Q4-Q1.

1. Telemetry, meta bug
   1. injected dlls, bug 678965
2. Memory, 570785

API implementation

1. caret and selection events, see meta bug 640591
2. IAccessible1.3: help IA2 group to make it happen and then implement it.
3. Support new ATK roles, bug 670067

Core stuffs

1. weak reference, bug 678429
   1. events
   2. relations
   3. wrappers layer (linux, msaa, xpcom)
   4. collections
2. DeXPCOMination, meta bug: bug 574336
3. separate MSAA/IA2 objects from internal objects: cycle collector problems when initiated from different process
4. empty doc handling: do not spam AT by temporary documents but don't ignore them entirely, see bug 638465
5. rework tree update logic, bug 690417, working draft.
6. Cleaning ups: keep code consistent and easier to maintain bug 389800, refer to out of date architecture draft.

e10s

Meta bug bug 646596.

Key problems:

1. linux bug 669625
2. AT other than NVDA bug 693644
3. core focus bugs
4. cross-platform traversal, alternative: provide a new way to walk between processes
5. don't keep content process windows as children of main window (dead lock problem)

Under investigation

Text interface

Goals:

1. be consistent to keyboard navigation
2. correct and consistent text interface implementation

Working draft of text implementation proposal.

XUL trees

Do something smart. XUL tree has flat accessible tree structure, when item is collapsed or expanded then we fire show/hide events for each item which is heavy. The problem: we need to keep AT updated so expanded state change event might be not enough. Possibly the better way is to switch to hierarchical tree structure. We could propose additional arguments for ATK signal "children-changed" and use REORDER event only on MSAA. Another aspect of the problem when tree view is changed.

Prune accessible tree

Figure out how we can keep accessible tree shorter. Don't expose accessibles for nodes with no semantics, see bug 646216.

OSX support

[help needed]

• performance tracker bug, [bug 454202]
• architecture bug, [bug 342989]
• improvements tracker, [bug 336306]

Rich text editing

[help needed]

Caret navigation is broken.

Other activities

Open AT collaboration project

1. start it, schedule activities into quarter goals.
2. make AT tests running on Mozilla tinderboxes