GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 351477
Standard action names not specified
Last modified: 2021-06-10 11:25:17 UTC
Names for standard actions exposed via the at-spi Action interface should be documented. Some typical actions are given at http://www.gnome.org/~billh/at-spi-new-idl/html/html/classAccessibility_1_1Action.html. This list should be formalized more so different apps and toolkits expose equivalent actions under the same name for standard widgets.
I'm marking this as an RFE, since it's difficult to anticipate all the different action 'names' possible. As it now stands, action names are basically just convenience IDs for the ATs, they are neither specified nor localized (or, rather, we don't specify in ATK whether they should be localized or not. Possibly they should, especially if we choose not to standardize them, in which case they are just 'strings' which may be exposed to the end users in some situations, as a means of labelling actions). On the other hand, action descriptions should be localized already.
I think we need to poke at this some more. In bug 519936, we exposed an issue where we needed to do comparisons on the action name in order to do some inference logic in Orca (e.g., look for a "toggle" action to infer if a table cell is a check box). With action names being translated (see bug 525226), we now have an issue where the string comparison on the action name becomes much more brittle. I'm thinking we can go a couple different ways here: 1) Move on with translating action names and add a programmatic string that can be used for comparisons. 2) Retract the stance that action names should be marked for translation, unmark all the Evolution action names, and update the AT-SPI spec to be clear about what is translated and what isn't. At this point, I think I'd opt for #2 because: * It is the easiest thing to do. * If non-translated names were being exposed to users, I think we might have heard about it by now. Thoughts?
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I'm going to go ahead and close this because it concerns a very old version. Feel free to open a new bug if the problem persists.
Curiously enough, this was discussed on IRC several times during the previous years, and got somewhat hot recently, due action-related discussions on w3c. I didn't know that the bug was already opened. So as is part of an ongoing discussion, I will reopen it. As the main affected are implementors on toolkits/applications (so server side), I will move this bug to ATK (that is the server side of GNOME accessibility framework).
GNOME is going to shut down bugzilla.gnome.org in favor of gitlab.gnome.org. As part of that, we are mass-closing older open tickets in bugzilla.gnome.org which have not seen updates for a longer time (resources are unfortunately quite limited so not every ticket can get handled). If you can still reproduce the situation described in this ticket in a recent and supported software version of atk, then please follow https://wiki.gnome.org/GettingInTouch/BugReportingGuidelines and create a ticket at https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/atk/-/issues/ Thank you for your understanding and your help.