SoK/2023/StatusReport/Rishi Kumar

Accessibility: Work on improving the accessibility of Tokodon

This project aims to improve the accessibility of tokodon by writing appium tests.

Writing these tests would ensure a set standard of code quality is maintained in tokodon and with improved accessibility leading to a more efficient and convenient experience for the end users.

Mentor

Carl Schwan

Merge Request

• Merge Request for testing different types of media attachments in statuses.
• Merge Request for fixing build errors after rebase.
• Merge Request for testing different types of interactions on status and its type.
• Merge Request for testing Search
• Merge Request for fixing the broken search UI in tokodon-offline
• Merge Request for making tokodon-offline executable.

Blog Posts

• Mid-journey Blog Post for Sok'23
• Second Blog Post for Sok'23

Timeline

Week 1 and Week 2

The first couple of weeks went on in researching how I would start tokodon without network connectivity, it was achieved by creating a new entry point named main-offline.cpp with the account initialised as the object of MockAccount class following which I created an executable named tokodon-offline by making relevant changes in src/CMakeLists.txt. The merge request for the implementation can be found here.

Week 3 and Week 4

The following two weeks were spent on writing appium test for search functionality. For this, I first had to make the search function in tokodon-offline, for achieving this I studied the already unit-tests for search and found out the code made mock API calls and received the search results through a search-result.json file so I followed the same approach and made the same mock API calls to receive search responses after which I was successful in making the search function. The merge request for this implementation can be found here

Once the search functionality was implemented, my next task was to write appium test for it, for which I referred to Harald's blog for the implementation, the merge request for search appium test can be found here

Week 5 and Week 6

The CI pipelines of tokodon were failing due to the tests performing settings read/write operations which were not required while testing, the maintainers of Tokodon helped me identify this issue and made a commit to fix the issue here.

After the CI pipelines were fixed I worked on writing appium tests for testing the interaction buttons of status and whether the status was a normal status or containing spoiler text, for achieving this I first made mock API calls to fetch the required statuses on the main timeline, then wrote appium tests for the relevant interactions button and type of status. The final merge request for the implementation can be found here

I also wrote a mid-journey blog post about my Season of KDE experience in these weeks

Week 7 and Week 8

My mentor Carl Schwan helped me rebase work/sok/offline-tokodon to the latest master so that I could work on the latest changes, which led Tokodon to stop building due to some build and dependencies error, so the subsequent weeks was spent on fixing various errors which I tackled by comparing the work/sok/offline-tokodon branch with the master branch and with previous commits, Carl was always available to give me clues whenever I felt stuck while fixing these errors. The merge request for fixing the build errors can be found here.

Week 9 and Week 10

Once all the build errors were fixed and Tokodon was able to build successfully, I worked on adding tests for testing different types of media attachments on statuses, for which I referred to Mastodon’s documentation to see what response is received while requesting different kinds of media attachment, which I then integrated into the already present statuses.json file, after which I was successful in displaying different kinds of media attachment.

Once all the different types of media attachments were visible, I expanded the TimelineTest test to include testing of media attachments by asserting whether the different types of media attachments were visible. The merge request for the implementation can be found here.

Conclusion

In conclusion, I managed to write 2 appium tests containing 8 sub-tests for testing various functionalities and improving the accessibility of Tokodon's GUI, which required making 6 Merge Requests.

Beyound SoK

During the SoK, I learnt a lot about how development takes place inside KDE and I plan continue contributing to KDE as much as I can in future

Contact

I am on Matrix as @k3ys:matrix.org.