#239 Accessibility Contributions

March 6, 2026 • 9 Notes • Curated by Felix

Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from February 27 to March 06.

GNOME Core Apps and Libraries

Calendar ↗

A simple calendar application.

Hari Rana | TheEvilSkeleton (any/all) 🇮🇳 🏳️‍⚧️ reports

Everyone, rejoice 🙌

Georges livestreamed himself reviewing and merging accessibility contributions in GNOME Calendar again, specifically the entirety of merge request !564, which introduces keyboard-navigable month cells. As a result, as of GNOME 50, GNOME Calendar’s month view will be fully navigable with a keyboard for the first time in its history!

Here’s a quick explanation of how to navigate:

  • When tabbing between events, focus moves chronologically. This means that focus continues to move down until there are no event widgets overlaying the current cell. Then, focus moves to the topmost event widget in the next cell or row. Tabbing backwards with Shift+Tab moves in the opposite direction.
  • On the last event widget, pressing Tab moves the focus to the adjacent month cell. Conversely, pressing Ctrl+Tab on any event widget has the same effect.
  • Pressing an activation button (such as Enter or Space) displays the popover for creating an event. Additionally, pressing and holding the Shift key while pressing the arrow keys selects every cell between the start and end positions until the Shift key is released, which displays the popover with the selected range.

The only high-level goal that needs work now is conveying these information with assistive technologies properly.

Both merge requests !564 and !598 took us almost an entire year to explore various approaches and finally settle on the best one for our use case. Everything was done voluntarily, relying solely on support from donors and those who share these posts, without any financial backing from other entities. In contrast, most, if not all, calendar apps backed by trillion-dollar companies still don’t offer proper keyboard navigation across their views. In many cases, they haven’t even reached feature parity. If it is not too much trouble, please consider funding my accessibility work on GNOME. Thank you! ♥️

GTK ↗

Cross-platform widget toolkit for creating graphical user interfaces.

Emmanuele Bassi reports

GTK 4.22.0 is now available for application developers! Lots of changes happened in this development cycle:

  • a new SVG-based format for symbolic icons, including state-based animations
  • GtkSvg, a paintable that renders (animated) SVG efficiently
  • GtkAccessibleHypertext, an interface for accessible object containing links
  • GTK now relies on the settings portal, under Wayland
  • improved language filtering in the font selection dialog
  • a new reduced motion setting, complete with media query, for controlling the amount and type of animations in widgets
  • GskRenderReplay, a new API for replaying render nodes
  • the backdrop-filter CSS property is now supported
  • GtkPopoverBin is a new widget that you can use to show a popover menu on a widget

GTK 4.22 is going to be available in the GNOME 50 run time.

Python Bindings (PyGObject) ↗

Python language bindings for GNOME platform libraries.

Arjan reports

PyGObject 3.56.0 has just been released. Major features include: better integration with GObject’s lifecycle (do_constructed, do_dispose), a simpler way to deal with Python wrapper objects, and cleanup of legacy code.

A write-up of the most important changes can be found at https://pygobject.gnome.org/news/pygobject-3-56.html.

This is a stable release, so you can find it on PyPI, as well as the GNOME download server.

Third Party Projects

Ronnie Nissan announces

This week I released concessio v0.3.0 adding support for umask conversions. This was a requested feature. I also added umask explanition to the help dialog. Hope you will like it.

You can get Concessio from Flathub

Ans Ibrahim says

Memento, the movie tracking app, got updates this week with version 1.1.0 and 1.1.1:

  • IMDb rating support in movie details and refresh flow
  • Localization improvements, including French translations
  • UI and navigation polish, plus layout fixes

Also highlighting the original 1.0.0 features:

  • Watchlist management with search, sorting, and pagination
  • Play history tracking with date, place, and optional comments
  • Movie details with cast/crew and external links
  • Dashboard and top-people insights

Marcel Tiede announces

There is a new community project Maui.Gtk that integrates GTK via the GirCore C# bindings as a linux backend for Microsoft’s MAUI.

Rat Cornu says

ratic is a new music player in construction, built with gtk-rs and relm4. The first version was released this week, with:

  • Support of most music files
  • Sort and group by album, artist, full-text searching
  • Dynamic blurred background with light/dark modes
  • A music queue with several play modes
  • Support of MPRIS controls
  • Internationalization support using weblate (currently only english and french) It still misses a lot of features, but it will continue to grow in the following weeks, so do not hesitate to test it, open an issue or even come talk with us in the matrix room!

Ronnie Nissan announces

Just today I published Embellish v0.7.0. This version adds support for custom fonts.

  • Add a custom font using a url pointing to a zip or tar.xz file
  • Export all the custom fonts
  • Import custom fonts either from a file or by copy pasting them in the import dialog
  • The import dialog using GtkSourceView to color highlight the json data

Tip: you can add any font, not just NerdFonts making Embellish a really useful tool in my biased opinion.

You can get Embellish from Flathub

Parabolic ↗

Download web video and audio.

Nick reports

Parabolic V2026.3.0-beta1 is here!

This release contains many new features, fixes and a new macOS build of the GNOME app! We are asking all users to help test this release and the new macOS build, if possible (as I personally do not own a Mac so I rely on users in the community to work with me in testing). Thank you for any help in advanced! 😃

Here’s the full changelog:

  • Added macOS app for the GNOME version of Parabolic
  • Added Windows portable version of Parabolic
  • Added the ability to specify a preferred frame rate for video downloads in the Parabolic’s settings
  • Added the ability to automatically translate embedded metadata and chapters to the app’s language on supported sites. This can be turned off in Converter settings
  • Added the ability to update deno from within the app
  • Added thumbnail image preview to add download dialog and downloads view
  • Added failed filter to downloads view
  • Improved selection of playlist video formats when resolutions are specified
  • Improved selection of playlist audio formats on Windows when bitrates are specified
  • Improved cropping of audio thumbnails
  • Improved handling of long file names, they will now be truncated if too long
  • Removed unsupported cookie browsers on Windows. Manual txt files should be used instead
  • Updated yt-dlp

That’s all for this week!

See you next week, and be sure to stop by #thisweek:gnome.org with updates on your own projects!