A better solution would be to use an XSETTING for a11y instead of just a
gconf key, so that apps could detect it w/o a gconf dependency. This
has been discussed in the past and seems to me it would have been better
than ripping the gnome_program stuff out first. As part of this, gtk+
would need to load the appropriate modules at runtime _itself_; i.e.
every app and/or toolkit would be responsible for reading the "please
turn on AT support" key and loading the appropriate modules. In the
case of gtk+ apps, the modules required are libgail and libatk-bridge;
for gnome apps that use embedding and bonobo, libgail-gnome is also
required. Some apps load their own specialized code as well, for
instance firefox and openoffice.