1. Dogtail: A GUI Test Tool
William Cohen
NCSU CSC 591W
March 17, 2008

2. What is Dogtail? A GUI test tool and automation framework
Written in Python
Uses Accessibility (a11y) technologies to communicate with desktop applications
Dogtail scripts written in Python and executed like any other Python program

3. Assistive Technology Service Provider Interface (AT-SPI1)
Gnome Accessibility Project component
Make interface more flexible:
Allow visual cues inplace of audio for hearing impaired
Allow screen reader and magnification for visually impaired
Provides hooks for other access method

4. Dogtails interface into GUI
Dogtail make use of the AT-SPI interface to determine what is on screen
Avoid issues “screen scraping”:
Issues where mouse should be located
Converting pixels back into text
GUI application being needs to use AT-SPI
Desktop needs to have accessibility enabled

5. Dogtail Installation Requirement: AT-SPI-enabled desktop
Python 2.3 or higher
ImageMagick 6.2 or higher
rpm-python or python-apt
ElementTree for Python
pyspi - Python AT-SPI bindings
On most distributions Dogtail package should automatically pull in other required packages:
yum install dogtail
apt-get dogtail
Need to turn on assistive technology and restart X

6. Dogtail Sniff Utility Provides graphical view of AT-SPI information
Can expand and collapse view of items

7. Sniff Demo

8. Dogtail Recorder Utility
Provides an easy way to record operations performed
Generates a dogtail python script
Resulting script can be saved
Script can be modified for various purposes

9. Recorder Demo

10. Dogtail Scripts Written in Python Import the needed Dogtail modules
Two script flavors:
Procedural
Object oriented

11. Running GUI Applications Without Display
Some test machines do not have displays (“headless”)
Dogtail has ability to run on those machine:
Use dogtail-run-headless command

12. Further Reading