Everybody knows that I have always been a firm believer in Gtk+’s potential to be a great cross platform toolkit beyond Linux. GIMP and Inkscape, as an example, are loyal users that ship builds for those platforms. The main challenge is the short amount of maintainers running, testing and improving those platforms.
Gtk+ has a few shortcomings one of them, one of the biggest ones is lack of a11y support outside of Linux. Since I have regular access to a modern OSX machine I decided to give this a go (and maybe learn son Obj-C in the process).
So I started by having a look at how ATK works and how it relates to the GTK DOM, my main goal was to have a GTK3 module that would walk through the toplevels and build an OSX accessibility tree.
So my initial/naive attempt is in this git repo, which you can build by installing gtk from brew.
Some of the shortcomings that I have found to actually test this and move forward:
- Running gtk3-demo creates an NSApp that has no accessibility enabled, you can tell because the a11y inspector that comes with XCode won’t show metadata even for the window decorator controls. I have no idea how to enable that manually, it looks like starting an actual NSApp, like Inkscape and GIMP do would give you part of that.
- Inkscape and GIMP have custom code to register themselves as an acutal NSApp as well as override XDG env vars in runtime to set the right paths. I suspect this is something we could move to G and GtkApplication.
- The .dylib I generate with this repo will not actually load on Inkscape for some reason, so as of now I am stuck with having to somehow build a replacement gtk dylib for Inkscape with my code instead of through an actual module.
So this is my progress thus far, I think once I get to a point where I can iterate over the concept, it would be easier to start sketching the mapping between ATK and NSAccessibility. I would love feedback or help, so if you are interested please reach out by filing an issue on the gitlab project!
Silicon Island 