First results in the Evince a11y improvements project
We are very excited and happy to announce our first results on the Evince a11y improvements project! For those of you that don't use GNOME or live under a rock, Evince is the great document viewer application for that desktop. It's a cute application that you probably use every day without even noticing it but it has a big problem with respect to accesibility. Almost all of its UI is accesible except for the main widget where the document is shown, which is where the neat things happen.
This has been a problem for a long time. The first bug report giving a warning about this issue is back from mid 2005 and a few people have tried to fix the problem without too much success. Then a small spanish goverment agency called Consortium Fernando de los Rios for the Knowledge and Information Society decided to found this (and others) project, which basically consist in make the damn thing work!
We are very glad we are working on this project. You can see our first results in the following video:
It shows ORCA (the GNOME screen reader) reading the text of a PDF opened with Evince. As you can see it has multi column layout and still it works great. This is mainly because recent changes in poppler code and it's great for us :-)
Now, don't even think this is done. There is a lot of work to be done and we are doing our best to work as close as we can with upstream people. Carlos Garcia, current Evince maintainer, is helping us a lot. His technical expertise and experience in Evince codebase is really making a difference to us. Thanks Carlos!
We still need to implement more methods of the AtkText interface and put it on the right place on Evince, caching the text and layout information that we get from poppler into Evince so we don't block the UI and everything is fast and smooth.
You can follow our progress in the Github clone that we made of Evince and poppler:
