Comment 10 for bug 433104

Will, et al.:

If I had to bet money, I'd say it's not a bottom up vs top down hierarchy issue.

Amongst the various and sundry tasks we are working on within WebKitGtk a11y is "collapsing/flattening" the accessible hierarchy so that instead of things like:

->Panel
   ->Paragraph
       -> text (this is)
       -> text (bold)
       -> text (text)

We have:

-> Paragraph

whose accessible text contains the string 'this is bold text'.

This happens to be a major change which is still very much a work in progress. Getting the events (and for that matter the states) all straightened out is still taking place. When it's done -- and for that matter, when the rest of the work necessary to make WebKitGtk accessible is done -- it will be wonderful, because I think we will find many things (including this Software Center) start to JustWork with a minimum amount of scripting support needed on an app-by-app basis. And some things might JustWork with no scripting support.

Unfortunately, WebKitGtk a11y work is not yet done. (I don't mean the changes I refer to above. I mean period.)

Distros which choose to employ tools that rely upon it might be able to hack around things which have not yet been implemented in WebKitGtk by providing their own custom scripts for Orca, but they should keep in mind that things are changing rapidly.

I hope this helps shed some light on things.