Enable GTK3 while running Orca by default

[Mudb0y]

Enable GTK3 while running Orca by default

[Mudb0y]

Unfortunately I've had to get rid of my Linux install, but as far as I remember that was all. I'll get an install running soon on a VM and will do some more testing.

[slook]

You can manually switch the GTK version with an environment variable, as such:

cd nicotine-plus
NICOTINE_GTK_VERSION=3 ./nicotine

You can also run 3.2.9 with NICOTINE_GTK_VERSION=4, which might work to some degree, but don't expect it to work very well. At least, maybe it will be interesting for debugging purposes. A lot has changed in 3.3.0, so it is possible that some new problems are caused within Nicotine+.

It doesn't seem like it would be helpful to force back the GTK version just yet, because that way we will never make any progress for improving accessibility. If things are really that bad, then we will consider your suggestion to force back the GTK version. However, it will be preferable that with your help we can find some fixes, or at least some work-arounds to whatever the specific issues are.

The Nicotine+ project does occasionally contribute some fixes upstream to the GTK project, so it would be worthwhile to identify exactly where the bugs are, and then the appropriate action can be taken to fix them.

Please do explain the detail of the accessibility issues you are facing. It will do for now for us to discuss it here in this thread.

[mathiascode]

Regressions I've noticed so far in the GTK 4 version:

• Lists/treeviews are silent (need to port them to the new GtkColumnView widget)
• Lines in textviews not being read in GTK 4 on Wayland (reported upstream: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/issues/6104)
• Menu buttons not read properly in GTK 4.10 and older (added a workaround in 37b37d8)
• Tooltips on some buttons not read in GTK 4.12 (added workaround in 6ef8d9b)
• Combobox/dropdown buttons don't read the selected item (fixed in f844fb4)
• Comboboxes with text entries don't read the associated label (fixed in 762f774)

Anything else?

[mathiascode]

Everything I've found so far should be either fixed or worked around, except for treeviews and textviews. If there are more remaining issues aside from these two, please report them.

[hboetes]

From a friendly contributor on IRC.

• in the tab control, where one can select between pages, aka search, buddies, rooms, interests, etc, pressing arrow keys to move to other tabs focuses controls of the page, without giving the user a chance to switch to the tab they're actually interested in. The fix, perhaps focus the new tab only when someone actively selected it with enter, or don't automatically switch focus to the page elements and let the user do so with tab
• if accidentally landing on the buddies list due to the previously described issue, there's a widget which traps keyboard focus, so accessibility tools can't get out of there, the only solution is to close the app and reopen it
• some toggle buttons don't read properly until you shift+tab back to them, for example the button to add filters, don't know why it's a toggle button, but yeah
• when adding a filter, sometimes information is repeated as if there are two widgets with the same name and label, just perhaps different roles in some cases, for example combo box. Except the file format, everything in there exhibits this behaviour
• the settings screen sometimes has issues with selections, where pressing the down arrow on a category might focus unrelated controls

That's about it, but keep in mind that I only used the file sharing part of the service, so I might be missing on some details outside that mode of operation.