lingo.lol is one of the many independent Mastodon servers you can use to participate in the fediverse.
A place for linguists, philologists, and other lovers of languages.

Server stats:

59
active users

#libadwaita

1 post1 participant0 posts today
Continued thread

After two weeks of writing, revising, and trying to make everything as digestible as possible, I finally published "GNOME Calendar: A New Era of Accessibility Achieved in 90 Days", where I explain in detail the steps we took to turn GNOME Calendar from an app that was literally unusable with a keyboard and screen reader to an app that is (finally) accessible to keyboard and screen reader users as of GNOME 49!

tesk.page/2025/07/25/gnome-cal

TheEvilSkeleton · GNOME Calendar: A New Era of Accessibility Achieved in 90 DaysThere is no calendaring app that I love more than GNOME Calendar. The design is slick, it works extremely well, it is touchpad friendly, and best of all, the community around it is just full of wonderful developers, designers, and contributors worth collaborating with, especially with the recent community growth and engagement over the past few years. Georges Stavracas and Jeff Fortin Tam are some of the best maintainers I have ever worked with, especially Jeff’s underappreciated superhuman capabilities to voluntarily coordinate huge initiatives and issue trackers. One of many Jeff’s initiatives is gnome-calendar#1036: the accessibility initiative. It is a big and detailed list of issues related to accessibility, and regularly gets updated. The upcoming release of GNOME, 49, will feature the biggest update GNOME Calendar has ever received (excluding the initial release). It will also be the accessibility update, where we managed to turn GNOME Calendar from an app that was literally unusable with a keyboard and assistive technology, to an app that is actually functional with a keyboard and screen reader in about three months. This article will explain in details about the fundamental issues that held back accessibility in GNOME Calendar since the very beginning of its existence, the progress we have made with accessibility as well as our thought process in achieving it, and the now and future of accessibility in GNOME Calendar.
Continued thread

Happy Disability Pride Month everybody :)

During the past few weeks, there's been an overwhelming amount of progress with accessibility on GNOME Calendar:

• Event widgets/popovers will convey to screen readers that they are toggle buttons. They will also convey of their states (whether they're pressed or not) and that they have a popover. (See !587)

• Calendar rows will convey to screen readers that they are check boxes, along with their states (whether they're checked or not). Additionally, they will no longer require a second press of a tab to get to the next row; one tab will be sufficient. (See !588)

• Month and year spin buttons are now capable of being interacted with using arrow up/down buttons. They will also convey to screen readers that they are spin buttons, along with their properties (current, minimum, and maximum values). The month spin button will also wrap, where going back a month from January will jump to December, and going to the next month from December will jump to January. (See !603)

• Events in the agenda view will convey to screen readers of their respective titles and descriptions. (See !606)

Accessibility on Calendar has progressed to the point where I believe it's safe to say that, as of GNOME 49, Calendar will be usable exclusively with a keyboard, without significant usability friction!

There's still a lot of work to be done in regards to screen readers, for example conveying time appropriately and event descriptions. But really, just 6 months ago, we went from having absolutely no idea where to even begin with accessibility in Calendar — which has been an ongoing issue for literally a decade — to having something workable exclusively with a keyboard and screen reader! :3

Huge thanks to @nekohayo for coordinating the accessibility initiative, especially with keeping the accessibility meta issue updated; Georges Stavracas for single-handedly maintaining GNOME Calendar and reviewing all my merge requests; and @tyrylu for sharing feedback in regards to usability.

All my work so far has been unpaid and voluntary; hundreds of hours were put into developing and testing all the accessibility-related merge requests. I would really appreciate if you could spare a little bit of money to support my work, thank you 🩷

ko-fi.com/theevilskeleton
github.com/sponsors/TheEvilSke

(Boost appreciated)

GitLabImprove accessibility of GcalEventWidget (!587) · Merge requests · GNOME / gnome-calendar · GitLabCalendar application for GNOME

If you are trying to find libadwaita based applications for your needs, then check out arewelibadwaitayet.com/

It's a comprehensive list of libadwaita powered Linux applications with over 300 apps currently listed.

Also if you see an app not listed that uses libadwaita, please consider opening an issue or sending a pull request to the project's repository.

github.com/redjohnsh/areweliba

arewelibadwaitayet.comLibadwaita Apps - A Curated List for Gnome

As part of our volunteer-driven accessibility initiative in GNOME Calendar, and for the first time in the 10+ years of Calendar's existence, we finally completed and merged the first step needed to have a working calendar app for people who rely on keyboard navigation. This merge request in particular makes the event widgets focusable with navigation keys (arrow left/up/right/down) and activatable with space/enter. This will be available in GNOME 49.

Most of GNOME Calendar's layout and widgets consist of custom widgets and complex calculations, both independently and according to other factors (window size, height and width of each cell, number of events, positioning, etc.), so these widgets need to be minimal to have as little overhead as possible. This means that these widgets also need to have the necessary accessibility features reimplemented or even rethought, including and starting with the event widgets.

We also hope to get other parts of GNOME Calendar accessible before GNOME 49, but I can't promise anything at the moment. We did start working with making the month view accessible: gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-c

GitLabMake the event widget accessible (!559) · Merge requests · GNOME / gnome-calendar · GitLabThis implements button functionality to make it able to focus and activate it. This also sets the appropriate accessibility role and labels/descriptions. Related:

Since Upscaler has just reached 150,000 installs on Flathub, I'm releasing Upscaler 1.5.0! Upscaler is an app that allows you to upscale images locally, securely, and completely offline.

Thanks to @zoeyTheWitch's wonderful contribution, this release introduces the long overdue functionality to load multiple images at once and add them to the queue. This avoids having to load and add each image to the queue, which will significantly speed up the process of adding images to the queue.

The entire async and threading model was ported to the asyncio and threading modules, thanks to the long *await*ed (pun very much intended) asyncio integration in PyGObject that was made available recently.

Loading images has become much faster and smoother, while using less memory as a direct result of the asyncio and threading port.

This release also makes saving the resulting images completely optional. Additionally, there is now a copy button to copy images without saving them. As such, the process to upscale images has gotten more straightforward than ever – just load the image, set the desired scaling factor and the image type.

The progress rows have gotten a redesign to make them more reminiscent to typical rows with progress bars.

You can get Upscaler 1.5.0 on Flathub: flathub.org/apps/io.gitlab.the

Discovered that #libadwaita apps can enable the convenience "What's New" button in their About dialog to show release notes: gnome.pages.gitlab.gnome.org/l

Some #GNOME apps already use it: stable releases of Calendar, Shortwave, Showtime, Papers, System Monitor, Decibels, Warp, etc.

I've now filed RFEs for this in Tuba, Epiphany, Contacts, Fractal, Secrets, Warehouse, Maps, Apostrophe, Snapshot, File Roller, etc.

Ideally I'd want to suggest it in Ptyxis, Text Editor, Builder, Loupe & Pika…

gnome.pages.gitlab.gnome.orgAdw.AboutDialog:release-notesReference for property Adw.AboutDialog:release-notes

High Tide is a Promising New TIDAL Client for Linux

Linux users hunting for a native client to stream music from TIDAL will want to keep an eye on a promising new open-source app called High Tide. High Tide is an unofficial but native Linux client for the TIDAL music streaming service. It’s written in Python, uses GTK4/libadwaita UI, and leverages official TIDAL APIs for playback. TIDAL, often positioned as the ‘pro-artist music streaming platform’, isn’t as popular as industry titan Spotify (likely because it doesn’t offer a ‘free’ ad-supported tier) but is nonetheless a solid rival to it in terms of features and catalogue breadth. Windows, macOS, Android and :sys_more_orange:
#News #Libadwaita #MusicPlayers #Tidal

:sys_omgubuntu: omgubuntu.co.uk/2025/01/high-t

Introducing Refine, an app to tweak advanced and experimental settings in GNOME. It is an alternative to GNOME Tweaks, and is a pet project I'm currently working to experiment with PyGObject and dconf, while following the data-driven, object-oriented, and composition paradigms.

The entire codebase is made up of widgets that provide all the functionality needed to add an option. For example, instead of adding each option programmatically in Refine, the ultimate goal is to have it all done in the UI file.

For example, if we want to add an option to enable or disable middle click paste, all we need is the following code in the UI file:

$RefineSwitchRow {
title: _('Middle Click Paste');
schema-id: 'org.gnome.desktop.interface';
key: 'gtk-enable-primary-paste';
}

That's it. The RefineSwitchRow widget will do whatever it needs to do to ensure the option is available, grab the setting if it's available, and display it to the user. Many of these widgets provide extra functionality, such as a Reset button.

You can get Refine on Flathub: flathub.org/apps/page.tesk.Ref

Everything else (source code, screenshot, etc.) is in the project website: tesk.page/refine/, as well as the Flathub link.

TheEvilSkeletonRefineTweak advanced settings in GNOME

For the past months I've been working on a distrobox client in #gtk #libadwaita. This is a sneak peek of what it looks like.

What's distrobox?

"Use any Linux distribution inside your terminal. Enable both backward and forward compatibility with software and freedom to use whatever distribution you’re more comfortable with"

I'm developing an application that is a proof of concept for a "clipboard pinner".

For someone like me who sometimes needs to copy and paste multiple pieces of text or images but doesn't want a clipboard manager monitoring everything I copy, this was the most user-friendly and practical solution I found.

It's called Serigy BTW.

I’ve been daily-driving a #LinuxMobile for over 2 years—both the #Librem5 and OnePlus 6, #PureOS and #PostmarketOS. I’ve loved the experience, especially the #Phosh UI and #Libadwaita apps.

But #LinuxPhones aren’t reliable enough for me now. With a newborn, I need to be reachable, so I’m switching back to Android.

Any recommendations? I’m torn between a #GooglePixel or #Fairphone with #GrapheneOS / #CalyxOS. Bonus points if I can dual boot Linux, or likely install it in some years!