Bug#571121: yelp: using webkit breaks accessibility

[Kenny Hitt]

On Tue, Feb 23, 2010 at 06:06:20PM +0100, Josselin Mouette wrote:
> The webkit package in Debian was supposed to have everything necessary
> for a11y before we made the switch, and I really thought this was
> settled now. If webkit is still not ready for Orca - and this is news to
> me - this is a matter that will also affect epiphany. If you can provide
> more information to the webkit maintainers and the Orca maintainer, that
> would be appreciated. 
> 
It appears there is confusion over the state of webkit accessibility.
To see the problem that caused me to file this bug:
run orca and open the help system or epiphany.
You will notice neither will provide any speech feedback beyond the
title of the window.

> > http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-accessibility-list/2010-February/msg00099.html
> > It would be really bad for Debian to release experimental code that has not
> > been released in a stable version.
> 
> Sorry, but the gecko backend is not in a releasable state. Building yelp
> against gecko is an option we can certainly not afford in the current
> state of affairs.
> 
That's not good.  I have talked to upstream Orca, yelp, and at least 1 webkit
developer.  The responce I got can be summed up by:
Since this is specific to Debian, Debian should be the one to fix it.
I did get yelp 2.28.1 to build locally without errors.  I realize this isn't a
Debian package, but yelp can be built against gecko.
Also, themuso uploaded yelp 2.29.91 to Ubuntu yesterday.  It now uses
gecko instead of webkit.
Breaking epiphany isn't a problem since Orca users have always used Firefox/
Iceweasel.

          Kenny