Aline Bessa

Thoughts about GWOP internship

alinebessa — Thu, 08 Sep 2011 15:02:42 +0000

My internship at GNOME is over since August 23rd, but it was only possible to write about it now.

In a way, I accomplished to all my tasks. Of course, they changed a lot along the way, but, in general lines, one can say I consistently contributed to Accerciser (docs + code) and Libatspi.

During the last week of my internship, my grad classes have started at UFMG (Federal University of Minas Gerais), and they’re pretty much what I’m up to at the moment. Of course, in my spare time, I’ll keep on contributing with Accerciser. By the way, my first after-internship task is making GTK+ H/V deprecations.

Endorsing Javier Antúñez’ mantra, “Just 15 minutes a day for better accessibility”!!

Reviewing libatspi docs and going back to Accerciser

alinebessa — Sat, 13 Aug 2011 20:46:35 +0000

Last week some people from the a11y team helped me reviewing the libatspi docs, and now they’re much better. I would like to specially thank my mentor Joanmarie Diggs and at-spi2 maintainer Mike Gorse. You rock! Again, you can check my documentation patches here.

With their help, I could find go back to Accerciser earlier. After some struggling with the new pygi-gtk3 branch, things are working pretty well here. I’ll help Accerciser maintainer Javier Antuñez with this new version’s development, initially with the plugins. Stay tuned for more updates on that!

Libatspi beta documentation done

alinebessa — Fri, 05 Aug 2011 21:50:16 +0000

Yes, that’s the post title. Though I had written in a previous post that I would work on that only after some Accerciser tasks, things changed.

My mentor (Joanmarie Diggs) told me that, different from Accerciser, the Libatspi documentation has some desirable, tighter deadlines. Et voilà: that’s why I changed my task order. Anyway, I wrote patches for all need-improvement items and they’re going to be/are being evaluated by Mike Gorse and Joanmarie Diggs.

Any help is welcome! If you have the time to help me reviewing 1, 2, or 1000 (kidding) patches, here they are!

After finishing the reviews and committing the patches, I’ll restart working on my Accerciser plan.

GWOP mid-term evaluation – Go go go Accerciser!

alinebessa — Mon, 18 Jul 2011 19:22:14 +0000

If you’re reading this blog, you know I’m currently working as an intern for the GNOME A11y team via the GNOME Women Outreach Program. The first half of my internship is over and I’m pretty sure I’ve learnt a lot about Accessibility and Documentation. Oh! I didn’t learn much about Python, since I had already coded in this language, but I guess I solved some pretty useful bugs for Accerciser.

On the documentation hand, I wrote a mallardized, topic-based guide for Accerciser, which has already been translated for a couple of languages. On the programming hand, I solved a reasonable amount of Accerciser bugs and did some enhancements. You can check these clicking on bugzilla links here and here. Guess it was a quite productive, useful time!

What’s next?

From now on, I’ll focus on the following tasks (ordered by priority):

Propose solution for Detach plugin tabs without any reason
Help Javier (Accerciser maintainer) with the pygi-pygtk3 Accerciser version he’s working on
Improve documentation for libatspi
Implement some code to the Interface Viewer interfaces that don’t have any: Desktop, Hyperlink, Login Helper, and Collection.

I’m quite sure they’ll keep me busy until the rest of my internship.

See you!

More plans for Accerciser

alinebessa — Thu, 07 Jul 2011 22:37:55 +0000

I solved the buglist I had set for Accerciser, besides testing and sending some more patches. I’ll keep working for Accerciser and here are the next steps:

Fix Plugin error on startup
Propose solution for Detach plugin tabs without any reason
Investigate Typing exit() or quit() in the IPython console hangs the application
implement enhancement Add Option to filter out apps with 0 children
implement some code to the Interface Viewer interfaces that don’t have any: Desktop, Hyperlink, Login Helper, and Collection.
Adapt everything to new pygi version Javi’s working on

Besides working for Accerciser, I’ll keep an eye on documentation. Right now I’m helping with the Accessibility wiki, analysing which pages are deprecated, which are ok, which need small fixes, which should be removed etc. It’s being great to develop a broader view about GNOME’s Accessibility Team and Tasks. After that, I’ll give pyatspi2 documentation a shot. It’s going to be much more challenging than the Accerciser docs (or so it seems), but I’m quite sure it’ll make me understand much more about the low-level abstractions that support Accessibility currently. So it’s worth it.

And that’s it for the moment.

Working on Accerciser’s bugs

alinebessa — Mon, 27 Jun 2011 14:22:46 +0000

Last week was shorter than usual since I had a thursday-friday holiday here in Brazil. Nevertheless, it was a quite productive time!

As I had pointed out here, my following tasks with Accerciser involve its bugs. So I examined the entire Accerciser’s buglist, tested all of its entries and provided feedback for each of them to Javier Antúnez, Accerciser’s co-maintainer. This feedback indicates which bugs should be closed, which are confirmed, which are not exactly bugs, which involve patches that need to be tested etc etc.

I also assigned some preliminary bugs for me:

And that’s it. Wish me luck with these bugs!

First version of Accerciser docs released

alinebessa — Mon, 20 Jun 2011 21:09:08 +0000

After many reviews, a topic-based, mallardized documentation for Accerciser is ready. Check the patches here (or clone it here and go to docs/accerciser). Another result of this work is a wiki with useful information for Accerciser Validator errors. The latter is a work in progress.

Documenting Accerciser in details made me read all of its code, write little patches, sharpen my English abilities, among other things. Now it’s time to move on and give more love to this awesome tool! How do I intend to do it? Fixing bugs and adding new functionalities. The plan is still in progress, but some things I’m commited with are:

review bugs in bugzilla for classify/close/reassign/etc.
assign myself to some prior bugs and close them
remove dependencies that are no longer used
it seems some Interface Viewer interfaces don’t show any code at the moment (collection, desktop, hyperlink, and login helper). It must be verified and, if confirmed, fixed

After that, I’ll update all Accerciser-related wikis. I would like to thank the a11y community for everything – in particular, Joanie and Javi. Without Joanie’s reviews, these docs would be much worse. Without Javi’s orientation, I wouldn’t know which would be the best place to dive into Accerciser’s code. You rock, guys!

And that’s all for now, folks!

Documenting Accerciser – first impressions

alinebessa — Sat, 11 Jun 2011 04:32:41 +0000

In the first days of my internship, I dedicated time for writing a demo that explored accessibility issues. You can read more about it here.

After some time, I realized that the demo would be almost 100% accessible – or 100% accessible – since I was only using default GTK+ methods. Basically, I discovered that a lib called GAIL would take care of most of my accessibility issues, turning my demo into something really boring – i.e., I almost wouldn’t use ATK. I even used it once to fix an accessibility error found via Accerciser, but it was something really simple involving comboboxes. There’s even a GTK+ patch for solving it without the need of using ATK.

To do something interesting that massively depends on ATK, the best way is to write a custom widget. Basically, you have to extend a GTK+ widget in a way that GAIL won’t find it by default – and that’s where you’ll find space to write tons of ATK code.

Since I didn’t find an interesting way of extending GtkEntry (or any other default widget) yet, and given that maybe I can do another more useful programming tasks, I skipped to my second scheduled task: documenting Accerciser in a topic-based, Mallard way. If you want to learn how something works, try writing a documentation for it. Today, I finished a beta version for preliminary reviews and what I have to say is that I read a lot about AT-SPI, pyatspi, libatspi, and accessibility. Also, I read most of Accerciser’s code and even wrote a simple patch for it. Now, I also have a good notion about how to write plugins for Accerciser. Besides learning a lot about this tool – what’s going to be useful if my programming tasks become related to it – I feel I’m doing something useful for the GNOME community.

I’ll keep on writing that little demo in my free time – just for the pleasure of it. Besides, I may use more GTK+ in the future (including this internship), so it’ll be good for exercising. After finishing the Accerciser docs, I’m thinking of helping the tool with new plugins, bug fixes and migration to GNOME 3.

If you read the docs and have any critics/tips/notes about it, please let me know.

Things I’ve learnt about accessibility during my first internship week

alinebessa — Fri, 27 May 2011 22:33:49 +0000

After some struggling with installing GNOME 3 and GTK+ 3, I finally started working!

I’m in the very beginning of a formulae/equations editor/visualizer. When someone is using a tool as OpenOffice, it’s possible to build complex formulae/equations to put on the text. Unfortunately, it isn’t very simple to render the equation beautifully to a SVG, for instance. More than that, I didn’t find anything that covers these purposes (visualizing/rendering formulae) in accessible GTK+/Cairo.

For building equations (in my opinion), it’s always better to use LaTeX, though many people find it a bit hard. My project consists, then, in implementing a simple formulae builder that can take a GtkEntry input and transform it either in MathML (that can be properly rendered to SVG via Lasem, for example) or – who knows? – LaTeX. Maybe converting one notation to another would be interesting, too.

The most important point, of course, isn’t about making something complicated : it’s about making sure that this simple application is accessible. People with visual impairments (or other kinds of disabilities) should find easy to build an equation with the tool, besides importing it to other formats. More than being enormously useful, the idea here is to write something from scratch, paying attention to every single implementation detail (specially those related to accessibility).

Right now, I have a little code that allows users to type the equation within the GtkEntry, besides selecting some operators from comboboxes (like square roots, integral symbols etc). Nevermind about the dummy data in Fig. 1 (music, food, movies): they’ll be switched to three different classes of mathematical symbols or something like this.

Fig. 1 First lines of useful code

The interface may grow up a little to allow users to navigate in a MathML tree related to the current equation shown in the GtkEntry. I’m thinking of adding a menu, too, with different rendering options etc.

Relevant insights

It was very interesting to notice, while talking with Joanmarie Diggs, David bolter and Alejandro Piñeiro, that making an app/demo/widget accessible doesn’t necessarily imply in adding extra information. This is my current mantra, since I spent some time figuring out about how to add extra info to an interface!

Another interesting thing that happened this week involves the way my mentors and I decided to work: first, I’ll build the code per se, without minding much about accessibility. Just write the code and check its quality with regular tools, such as lint, gdb and valgrind. Nevermind about accerciser for the moment: a key tool to guarantee that the code is accessible. After that, I’ll apply accerciser to figure out which are the most common points I forgot while implementing (related to accessibility, of course). This is going to be very useful to the documentation I’ll do next month, since it’s going to be devoted to developers that don’t know much (or don’t know anything) about accessibility. It’s like notes made from an outsider. I do like the idea .

And last, but not least, I’d like to thank my friends Caio Tiago and Tomaz Canabrava for all the help and opinions they gave me throughout the week. You rock! Also, I’d like to thank the GTK+ community for releasing such a complete documentation about it. It’s being enormously useful!

Updates about my GNOME 3 installation

alinebessa — Wed, 25 May 2011 14:25:16 +0000

Hey everybody!

Thanks a lot for all the suggestions you gave about what to do to install GNOME 3 and GTK3 properly. Considering that most of the suggestions were about installing Fedora 15 – and since I’ve heard many good things about this distro since always – this was my choice.

After some struggling, I finally got it working with a little help from my friends at my old college! Now, it’s time to start having some fun with GTK3. I intend to make a custom widget that handles mathematical formulae and equations so they can be understood better by people with visual disabilities. At least, that’s the plan for the moment.

Thanks again and stay tuned!