Update on GNOME Newton, the Wayland-native accessibility project

The Newton project, focusing on developing a new accessibility architecture for modern free desktops, provides an update on its progress. Named after Newton, Massachusetts, where the Carroll Center for the Blind is located, the project aims to enhance accessibility for users. Key components include Wayland-protocols, AccessKit, Mutter, Orca, GTK, and libadwaita. The project enables running applications inside Flatpak sandboxes without exceptions, supporting various GTK 4 apps. While progress has been made in making Orca usable on Wayland with real GTK 4 apps, some features are still in development or not fully functional, such as synthesizing mouse events, text attributes, table support, and certain states not being exposed. The architecture overview highlights the push-based approach for accessibility updates and the D-Bus protocol for communication between assistive technologies and the compositor. Future challenges include optimizing performance for large text documents and addressing architectural issues related to accessibility tree updates and surface exploration for assistive technologies. Additionally, plans to extend Newton support to the GNOME Shell UI are being considered.