Early Thursday morning I get on a plane, and start the long and winding journey to Las Palmas de Gran Canaria. Two weeks ago I could not not imagine boarding another plane, luckily I have recovered from my previous travel fatigue, and I am excited to go! This would not have been possible without the generous sponsorship from the GNOME foundation. It has to be the greatest community around. I also look forward to meeting the second greatest community – KDE. It will also be nice to meet new friends and get re-acquainted with old ones.

I am up and traveling more than usual this summer. Which is great, although I really would like to spend as much time as possible up in the North West before it gets cold and dark again.

I am now at UDS Karmic (come say hello!), and it takes a while to explain to folks where I live, and what is up with me. I moved out of my Tel-Aviv apartment last week, and I am couch surfing (thanks Emily!) in Seattle next week, looking for a home. Oh, and once I land in Seattle, I will go right back to the airport and spend the weekend in the Bay Area for a JVP conference.

Thanks to the GUADEC travel committee, I will be attending Gran Canaria! I didn’t really plan to attend this year, but now that I am, I need to take advantage of the time there to the max. I’ll be cheering Ara when she presents the desktop testing project, and I will be unofficially unvieling LDTP2. I also want to catch up with folks on the a11y front, there has been some excellent work lateley: D-Bus AT-SPI is taking shape, UIA, Orca is becoming slick, and MouseTrap is neat. There is also plenty of chllanges ahead, namely WebKit and the audio/speech stack. I’ll also try to make myself as useful as possible to the event organizers.

]]> http://monotonous.org/2009/05/28/tel-aviv-barcelona-tel-aviv-seattle-san-fran-seattle-gran-canaria-seattle/feed/ 1 http://monotonous.org/2009/05/05/ldtp-take-two/ http://monotonous.org/2009/05/05/ldtp-take-two/#comments Tue, 05 May 2009 08:04:10 +0000 Eitan http://monotonous.org/?p=190 Recently some brave individuals started working on an upstream automated testing project for GNOME. This is exciting.

I say brave because we had a discussion regarding this a couple of years back, and if I recall correctly we stalled when it came to choosing an automation library. Anyway, it was decided that we will be going ahead with LDTP, big step.

LDTP is a mature library, and being such it had accrued sets of requirements from the different utilizers. The core is threaded, and written in cspi, which is unmaintained today, and uses a raw socket to communicate to the client end.

With Nagappan’s blessing, I started work on a Python rewrite of the core. The main goal being to simplify the code-base and prepare LDTP for the eventual migration of AT-SPI to D-Bus. We also chose to use higher level protocols for communication: XML-RPC. Also, this new version does away with threading in favor of an event loop that plays nicely with AT-SPI events.

After a week of work, I became fairly pleased with the shape it has taken. I used introspection wherever possible as not to duplicate the API both on the client and on the server. The introspection also helps in generating ooldtp’s API, the object oriented interface to LDTP.

The code could be checked out from my github tree.

This release does not have much new, the big changes are in pyia, the Python MSAA library, I added the option for unlocalized role names and states. This fixes some bugs when testing on localized desktops.

Pyia is really nice, if you have any use for MSAA in Windows, and you could use Python, use pyia.

Before I begin, if you want to read up on antisemitism on the left, this week The Guardian had some wonderful columns written by lefty U.K. Jews on that topic. One column was followed by a rebuttal, but in my opinion both columns complement each other beautifully.

1. Miner’s Song – Woody Guthrie
2. How’s Chances – Ella Fitzgerald
3. Theme From Rawhide – The Blues Brothers
4. Pannonica – Thelonious Monk
5. Girl From The North Country – Bob Dylan And Johny Cash
6. Hypnotize – The White Stripes
7. People Ain’t No Good – Nick Cave
8. Sao Paulo – Morcheeba
9. Land of 1000 Dances – Wilson Pickett
10. Pulled Up – Talking Heads
11. Walk Like an Egyptian – Bangles
12. עמיר לב – לפעמים אני מאושר
13. For The Damaged – Blond Redhead
14. In My Bed – Amy Winehouse
15. History Of Lovers – Iron And Wine/Calexico
16. Breathless – Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds

This has been a bitter lesson for me. Since 2006, I have been in dispute with this country regarding the war in Lebanon. I was outraged when it started, both at the government and the gullible public. During those summer weeks there was nobody I knew in Israel who was thinking sensibly and not repeating the hasbara ex-general pundits were feeding everyone over the tube. The entire venture was a failure. A commission was formed, politicians were forced to quit public life, and the army practically purged it’s entire senior command.

I was not expecting Israel to apologize, to knock on my door and say “we were wrong, you were right”. I was pessimistic on one hand, Israel’s military was going to look for the first chance to redeem it’s lost esteem, but optimistic in on the other, the public will not eat this kind of bullshit again. I was hoping that the 2006 experience would cultivate some healthy scepticism that would not allow generals to get away with anything.

I was wrong. The war in 2006 was a failure, and everybody took it upon themselves to make it “work” this time, not just the army and government, but the public too. I naively believed that the disproportionate destruction and civilian death in Lebanon tickled the public, just a bit, but it didn’t. Lebanon turned into an unpopular war because of the shoddy intelligence, the rusting equipment and the hesitant commanders. The national disgrace was not the carnage, but the amateurish way in which it was carried out.

By those standards, this last episode was an outstanding success. The intelligence was good, the raids were potent and demoralized the enemy, the reservists recieved modern and lubricated equipment, and the expectations were low. The dying and suffering civilians in Gaza did not play a role in the metrics of this operation’s success. The disfigured children in overcrowded hospitals were a setback only in the sense that the world was watching, and it was getting awkward. The public here did not blink.

Do you want your children to learn that narritive in history class? It is a mark of Cain, not a victory. We can’t let it go down as one.

A lot of these themes remain relevant today. Because of the illegal nature of our actions in Gaza, I thought I would share the following song. Please excuse my rough translation:

The Ten Commandments

On a sunny and pleasant spring morning
We all rose as one man
Strong and invigorated people
Of good stature and brave
We rose and we climbed mount Sinai
Where we received the word of The Lord
We climbed proud with song and poem
The word of The Lord to return.

On a sunny and pleasant spring morning
We all returned as one man
Strong and invigorated people
Of good stature and brave
Our heads held high
Our shoulders light
Filling our lungs with air.

I found on the internets a video about the Shampoo Queen scandal. It features the song above. If I had all the time in the world, I would have translated it. My favorite quote there comes after a high-school student asks the IDF’s chief of staff, Bar-Lev, if “The Queen of The Bath” has hurt the army’s morale. Bar-Lev replies “A week ago I went to an IDF outpost in Sinai and asked the soldiers ‘what is your opinion regarding The Queen of The Bath?’ they answered ‘Bring the queen, we will give her a bath over here!’”. I love that quote because it plays so well into Levin’s critique of a militarized society.

On Saturday the moderates carried out a strike that left over 200 dead in less than 5 minutes. The body count is growing, we are past 300 Gazans killed, Saturday and today brought the first two Israeli civilian casualties. The peace-loving moderates vowed not to stop the overwhelming destruction until “the reality on the ground changes”.

Livni continued and said “We expect the world’s support for those who fight the free world’s struggle”. On this point all agree, Gaza is not part of the free world.

Dalia Itzik, the Knesset chairperson said “this is not a time for politics, we must stand behind the army”. Similar statements were heard across the political spectrum from left to right. Besides a Tel-Aviv minority, the only bitter cries of descent are coming from Palestinian-Israelis. The media has been quick to point it out, and the threat of this fifth column.

The pattern is familiar, the Israeli street is proud of the IDF’s potent use of force: The smart bombs, the effective intelligence gathering, and the cool-headed generals. A true Israeli moment. As Gideon Levy wrote “Operation Cast Lead, it will end with a Kleenex”. In a country where corruption and incompetence reign supreme in the halls of government, it’s citizens trust their future in the professional and war-hardened hands of the defense establishment. The IDF had some low-points, but it never stopped being a winning brand. What pride would we have left without it?

I voted for Labor in ‘99, maybe I was foolish. In the last four years I have vowed not to vote for Labor many times, but here is another reason: The few Knesset seats that it will win in the general elections will have been procured with blood.

When I originally proposed this project, with the help of Aaron Leventhal, the uses and goals branched out in many directions, so when I finally started work I consolidated the specification to five main points:

1. It will provide a means of comparison between two static accessible heirarchies of different browsers.
2. It will provide a means of comparison between two different event sequences with the same interaction in different browsers.
3. It will run automatically, and will be able to flag discrepancies between two browsers.
4. There will be a finite set of test cases that will provide a generic benchmark for conformance.
5. A user should be able to throw it at any URL or interaction script, two browsers, and do a more interactive comparison (without preset rules).

In the hopes of building as much as possible on existing stuff, I used Selenium, a mature automated web test framework to drive the automation, both for launching browsers scripting user interaction. Selenium was perfect because it supported all mainstream browsers, and is cross-platform. By expanding Selenium I made it possible to check for certain accessible objects, subtrees, events or event sequences, both on Linux and Windows.

I also took advantage of the Codetalks test cases that were being written to provide requirement number 4, a set of finite tests.

As for requirement number 5. It took a lot of effort to find a way to make a comprehensible comparison between two complex accessible object trees. Ultimately I think that the end result was worth the effort, which consisted of algorithmic work based on a paper titled Change detection in hierarchically structured information, and of UI work.  You could see the results in my previous post.

I think an important achievement in this project has been the fact that this framework is cross-platform. I did this by utilizing pyatspi for Linux accessibility, and pyia for Windows, the two libraries are similar, and allowed easy cross-platform support.

Pyia is a Python MSAA client library that I wrote early on to get acquainted as quickly as possible with Windows APIs. I got a lot of working code snippets from NVDA when I started working on it. The end result is a fairly straight forward, easy to use library. So if you are planning to do any Windows AT development in Python, I would recommend giving this library a spin. You could download the latest version here.

To conclude, I hope I layed down a foundation for plenty of AT-side testing and conformance benchmarks. I pretty much kept the work browser neutral, so I hope that browser developers across the board will feel comfortable picking this up and using it in their accessibility testing.

A big thanks to Marco, Aaron and Frank for supporting me on this one, and I really hope my work makes a difference.

It is now possible to extract pretty interesting comparisons of browser accessibility API implementations.
Here are a two comparisons between Firefox nightly builds, and Internet Explorer 8 beta 2.

The comparison view only works on Firefox, I do not dare try it on anything else.

1. Mozilla.org (comparison)
2. WAI-ARIA tree example (comparison)

Here is comparison of the browser chrome between Firefox 3.0.4 and Firefox nightly.

I hope you have as much fun comparing as I did!