Category Archives: WebKitGTK+

Wrapping up the GNOME a11y hackfest

Published / by mario / 1 Comment on Wrapping up the GNOME a11y hackfest

As I told in my previous post, I’ve spent the last week in Seville attending the GNOME Accessibility Hackfest, which was an amazing experience to me, so I guess now it’s time to talk about some (mostly personal and subjective) conclusions.

First of all, let’s repeat this was the first time I attended an a11y related hackfest, and from that point of view the experience was even better and more rewarding than what I’d expected. Meeting other a11y developers in real life and putting faces to them, along with being able to check the real needs that people demand from assistive technologies was an awesome experience, and way richer than just having a list of bugs in need of getting fixed.

Up to this point, I can say that one of the best things I extracted from the hackfest is that I’ve learned, with real-life living examples, why implementing certain kind of stuff in the WebKitGTK port is so important for people with diverse kind of impairements, and even learned to prioritize and value different a11y related issues so I could make the most of my work to be more effective when helping, with my humble 2 cents in my daily work, to make the next release of GNOME a good one also from the point of view of accessibility. Obviously, there’s still a long road ahead to keep learning and improving, but I think this is a good achievement anyway, if you ask me.

Other than that, together with Joanmarie Diggs, we managed to move some important things forward related to the integration of WebKitGTK based applications and the ORCA screen reader, so now the “ORCA experience” with the web is clearly better compared to how it was some months ago (or at least that’s what Joanmarie says, and I trust her). In this regard, I feel specially proud of the advancements we’ve been doing with the implementation of the AtkHypertext/AtkHyperlink related stuff, which makes the experience of “screen reading” a web page way better and more complete than how it would be without that feature. And I mention this stuff here, because that’s precisely what I’ve been working on most of the time during the hackfest and  because, even though it’s still a provisional patch pending on some final tweaks to be proposed for review, I hope it will be soon integrated in WebKitGTK…. (you know, ‘hope’ is a so beautiful word… but I feel somehow confident with this stuff, “let’s hope I’m right” :-)).

So, as you can see I have reasons to be very happy about the results of the hackfest, even if we all were somehow jinxed because one reason or another, and the overall result of all this stuff is that I clearly felt a boost in my motivation to keep working on this stuff and to keep helping to improve the overall status of the accessibility from my beloved WebKit world… which is not that bad, IMHO.

My birthday cake coming from the GNOME a11y team, by Juanje OjedaLast but not least, I have to say there was room as well for having a lot of fun (“All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy”) with my mates from the GNOME accessibility team, who even had prepared a surprise for me in the shape of a cake to celebrate my birthday (see the picture below, by Juanje Ojeda).

Thank you guys! It was a really really nice experience! Let’s repeat it soon in the future… but as for now, let’s get back to work!

Attending to the GNOME a11y hackfest

Published / by mario / 2 Comments on Attending to the GNOME a11y hackfest

As my mate Alejandro said back in June, next week the 1st AEGIS international conference will take place in Seville, Spain, and there I’ll be attending, together with him, the GNOME Accessibility Hackfest that is planned to happen there as a parallel event to the conference (see AEGIS web page or GNOME live wiki, for more details).

As for me, this is the first time I attend to an a11y-related hackfest and I must said I’m quite excited about it, as been there should be the perfect scenario to work hard on moving things forward related to a11y support in the WebKitGTK platform, which has been what I’ve been working on most of the time during the last months here in Igalia, as part of our WebKit team.

On top of that, this is also going for me the first time I’ll meet in real life some people I usually work with in a regular basis since I started working on a11y-related stuff in WebKitGTK, such as the always helpful Joanmarie Diggs, who patiently answers all my doubts about those bugs blocking ORCA support, for instance.

Because of all this, I have great expectations about this hackfest, both as a personal experience (from the most selfish point of view you can imagine) and as a great boost to all the work being currently done to improve GNOME as an accessible platform towards the GNOME 3.0 release.

Can’t wait!

Calentando motores para la GUADEC-ES

Published / by mario / 1 Comment on Calentando motores para la GUADEC-ES

Con motivo de la celebración de la VII GUADEC Hispana (o GUADEC-ES) una invasión de GNOME hackers y allegados invadirán tierras coruñesas durante toda la semana que viene, y esta vez no estará María Pita para defender la ciudad, por lo que si todo transcurre como debería, y no hay nubes de ceniza ni cosas por el estilo, la Facultad de Informática de la Universidad de A Coruña acogerá durante dos días 19 ponencias/talleres sobre temas diversos relacionados con GNOME, como comentó Chema en su blog recientemente.

La conferencia será un evento “de amplio espectro”, donde tienen cabida tanto aquellas personas ya involucradas en la comunidad GNOME desde hace tiempo, como aquellos otros perfiles menos iniciados que quieran iniciarse o simplemente conocer más acerca de esta comunidad, tanto a nivel de usuario como de desarrollador, ya que habrá ponencias de todos los gustos, niveles y formas.

Por mi parte, y por lo que parece leyendo el programa de la conferencia, me tocará dar dos charlas en las mañana del Jueves y el Viernes acerca de dos temas que ocupan desde hace unos meses mi día a día en Igalia:

  • WebKit (desde el punto de vista de GNOME), proyecto en el cual trabajo actualmente intentando mejorar el estado de la accesibilidad en su port para GTK+ (WebKitGTK+), aunque el ámbito de la charla no será restringido a ese aspecto exclusivamente, sino a dar una visión global del estado del arte, últimas mejoras realizadas y una perspectiva del futuro de la plataforma
  • git, el sistema de control de versiones distribuido que uso actualmente y que, al menos en mi opinion (y diría que no estoy sólo), es uno de los mejores DVCS hoy en día. La charla-taller estará enfocada a aquellas personas interesadas en empezar a usar git o, al menos, en conocer en que consiste y que se puede hacer con este sistema. No será una charla avanzada pero se asumirán conocimientos básicos de otros VCS no distribuidos, como CVS o Subversion.

Y nada más creo… simplemente decir que nos vemos la semana que viene y que estoy deseando que empiece ya la conferencia, a pesar de que no voy a poder asistir a todas las ponencias (al menos a las de la tarde) por tener que atender mis nuevas obligaciones… aunque “sarna con gusto no pica”, no?

Aunque quien sabe… quizás aún así me pasaré por la tarde de visita con un GNOME hacker muy especial :-)

Nos vemos!

Trying latest epiphany/WebKit in Ubuntu

Published / by mario / 16 Comments on Trying latest epiphany/WebKit in Ubuntu

Even though I’ll be stating the obvious for so many ubuntu users/developers reading this post, I’d like to post a quick recipe for those who don’t know how to easily install the latest version of epiphany with the WebKit backend, as well as all the needed dependencies, without having to mess with compiling the source code (which is not always an easy nor a quick task, by the way).

So here we go

  1. First of all, this only works for Ubuntu Jaunty or Karmic, since there are no PPAs available for previous distros to install Epiphany (WebKit PPAs provided since Hardy).
  2. Add the PPA’s from the WebKit Team both for installing latest version of WebKit and Epiphany. So, that is, add the following lines to your /etc/apt/sources.listfile (replace ‘karmic’ with ‘jaunty’ if needed):
    deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/webkit-team/ppa/ubuntu karmic main
    deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/webkit-team/ppa/ubuntu karmic main 
    
    deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/webkit-team/epiphany/ubuntu karmic main
    deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/webkit-team/epiphany/ubuntu karmic main
  3. Import the GPG key of the repo in APT:
    sudo apt-key adv --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com --recv-keys 2D9A3C5B
  4. Update APT packages cache:
    sudo apt-get update
  5. Install the needed packages:
    sudo apt-get install epiphany-browser epiphany-browser-dataepiphany-extensions
  6. Just wait and let APT to do its magic :-)

And that’s all. After those simple steps you should be enjoying the last version of  this great and amazingly fast browser (2.29.6 at the time of writing this post), which is nowadays under heavy development, continuously getting better, better and even better on its roadmap towards GNOME 2.30.

So, what are you waiting for? Just go ahead and give it a try if you haven’t done it yet and make it your default browser ;-). Now you don’t have to manually compile all the needed stuff you just don’t have any good excuse not to do it.

And don’t forget to report any issue you find in the bugzilla. Remember feedback (and patches, of course) is the best way to help with improving it even more!

Ah! by the way, almost forgot to say that…

I’m attending FOSDEM

…as another member of the Igalia gang hanging around there this weekend.

See you there guys!

[Update 2010/01/04] As commented by zerwas, there’s an even easier way from Karmic on:

  1. Add the PPA’s from the WebKit Team both for installing latest version of WebKit and Epiphany:
    sudo add-apt-repository ppa:webkit-team/ppa
    sudo add-apt-repository ppa:webkit-team/epiphany
  2. Update APT packages cache:
    sudo apt-get update
  3. Install the needed packages:
    sudo apt-get install epiphany-browser epiphany-browser-dataepiphany-extensions

WebKitGTK+ Hackfest is over

Published / by mario / 8 Comments on WebKitGTK+ Hackfest is over

I’m writing this post from the Igalia office on Sunday at 23:00 pm and no… I’m not crazy nor I was expulsed from home or something like that. It’s just that today is the last day of the WebKitGTK+ hackfest and, although  was not officially an attendant to the hackfest (see http://live.gnome.org/WebKitGtk/Hackfest2009), I don’t regret to have joined yesterday, since it was a quite productive and interesting experience, and hopefully quite productive as well for the projects that most of the people here were working on during the whole week.

To be honest, in my case there’s not much stuff to to talk about but just a couple of patches for libsoup, epiphany and WebKit that I was working on (some of them already got in), but I can assure you guys that the rest of the people (I mean, the “official” attendants) didn’t stop working even for a second during these days, getting awesome results, if you ask me (although of course they also found some time for relaxing going out for a walk, or even playing the Wii here in the office):

Martin and Xan

Martin and Xan, with the blackboard behind (and some results already visible)

And that’s all folks, now I’d better go home to have a (deserved) rest since tomorrow I’ll still have to wake up early in the morning and to make the most of my first day of holidays (yes!!!).

See you guys and hope next year we can repeat this experience (and I hope next time I’ll be able to join full time, also). Just a last picture to finish this post…

WebKitGTK+ Hackfest 2009

WebKitGTK+ Hackfest 2009