[a11y] Feisty gnome-panel applets lack names, descriptions

[Joanmarie]

Binary package hint: gnome-applets

In Edgy, all of applets in gnome-panel had names and/or descriptions and/or labels. For instance, the description associated with the trash applet had a description which indicated how many items were in the trash. The volume control embedded component had the name of "volume control" and a description which indicated the track and current volume (e.g. "Master 83%"). The weather applet embedded component's description indicated the city and conditions; the current temperature was contained in a label in one of the component's descendants. And so on, and so on.

I just installed Feisty and all of this information seems to be absent -- at least for all of the non-default applets. (It is still present for Show Desktop, Window List, Workplace Switcher, and clock). As a result, screen readers such as Orca can no longer provide access to these items. Instead they can only say "panel" because that is apparently all that is currently being exposed via AT-SPI. (You can verify this using AT-POKE)

Just in case I was missing a package, I tried building and installing from source gnome-panel and gnome-applets. It made no difference.

According to one of the developers of gnome-panel, names, descriptions, and the like are contained in the server files shipped with the applets and their absence is a bug within the distro.

[Joanmarie (joanmarie-diggs-deactivatedaccount)]

Update: It seems that without libgail-gnome-module installed, the above is the case. With it installed, I can now see the names and descriptions via AT-POKE. In light of this, would it be possible to make libgail-gnome-module a dependency of gnome-panel?

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

Thank you for your bug. gnome-panel is not the right place for that, the tool needing that package could have a Recommends on it, you indicated at-poke, updating the package to reflect that

[Henrik Nilsen Omma (henrik)]

Accessibility bugs are often not like other bugs :)

Seb, I think you're right that it should be pulled in by the AT app, but more importantly by Orca than by at-poke. Joanie first noticed the problem when using the Orca screen reader which needs various GTK applications to make some textual information available via AT-SPI. In the case of gnome panel, the icons themselves have little meaning to a screen reader without these labels.

She simply used the at-poke utility to diagnose the problem further. It is a tool used by assistive technology developers to probe applications for information available via AT-SPI and we ship it in universe.

Adding a gnome-orca package task as I suspect it may have a missing recommends or dependency. On my Edgy system libgail-gnome-module is pulled in by gnopernicus, which is fine but it breally also needs to be pulled in by Orca.

[Daniel Holbach (dholbach)]

 gnome-orca (2.17.92-0ubuntu2) feisty; urgency=low
 .
   * debian/control:
     - added libgail-gnome-module to Depends. (LP: #80639)

[Daniel Holbach (dholbach)]

I'll upload the at-poke change soon, with a new upstream version (needs approval - bug 88714).

[Daniel Holbach (dholbach)]

Uploaded. Closing the bug.