Notes from the Orca list:

From: Nolan Darilek <nolan@thewordnerd.info>
To: 	 orca-list@gnome.org
Subject: 	[orca-list] Making gnucash accessible
Date: 	Sun, 05 Aug 2007 22:47:48 -0500 (23:47 EDT)


Hello. I played with gnucash for a bit today. While it is highly  
accessible to the extent described in the wiki, I found the  
transaction entry to be entirely inaccessible. I could read the area  
with the review cursor, and could read what I assumed to be a status  
bar with information on the field that presumably had focus (I.e.  
"Enter the number of the transaction," "Enter a description for the  
transaction," etc.) I couldn't read any text that I entered, nor  
could I find anything that appeared to be a text entry area.

Does this mean that gnucash cannot be made accessible? Or, if so, how  
would one go about making this panel accessible? I'd be happy to take  
a crack at writing the script, I just don't know how to find this  
invisible field and, once found, what to do with it when I have.

I played with gnucash a little bit just now.  It looks like the transaction area is made up of some custom controls that are not very accessible.  I think some work may need to be done in gnucash to expose the information.  :-(

You can accutally enter at least some transactions for example you can
use ctrl-t to add a transfer transaction using a fairly standard
dialogue box.  However you cannot read the existing transactions or
edit any of the transactions.  This makes gnucash basically useless
from an accessibility standpoint as a financial tracking program
without the ability to enter transactions is fairly useful.

How bad is this going to be?
Gnucash is in Guile.  Assuming it is a custom widget does at-spi bindings need to be added to Guile or is it just hacking  on the Gnucash code that needs to happen?

I understand from what I read on the Orca list, GNU Cash uses wxwidgets.  I also heard that wxwidgets was completely inaccessible.  I wonder if I could use this bug as a jumping off point to try and see what it would take to get the wxwidget developers to line up better with ATK.  I think the ability to use GNU Cash with Orca would be a compelling experience indeed.  At present, it is not viable and frankly, not worthy of mention in the accessible applications section of the Orca Wiki.

You can go ahead and assign to me but I probably won't accomplish much until wxwidgets is tackled.

GnuCash is not using wxwidgets. It is based on gtk. Also, most of the windows, dialogs and fields are set up using a combination of glade files and C code, not really guile code. Older versions of GnuCash relied more heavily on guile.

As for the transaction lists (called a "register" in GnuCash), this is indeed a custom widget. It is an item that is on the developer's to do list for quite a long time to convert this custom widget to a plain gtktree widget. One effort was started a couple of years ago, but it never got finished unfortunately.

I do think that orca can only work successfully with GnuCash when this register rewrite is completed.