Re: D-Bus replacement for AT-SPI Accessibility

[Peter Korn <Peter Korn Sun COM>]

Mark,

Thank you for all of your work (and your continuing work) in this area.

In addition to the list you enumerate below, we should also include on 
the to-do list:
- modifying the Java to AT-SPI bridge which uses CORBA
- validation against other AT / AT tools which use AT-SPI in one form 
or another - Dasher, accerciser


Regards,

Peter Korn
Accessibility Architect & Principal Engineer,
Sun Microsystems, Inc.

> Hello everyone,
>
> For a long while now I have been working on a D-Bus version of the Gnome
> accessibility framework, AT-SPI. The project has taken longer than
> expected, but much of the functionality is now in-place.
>
> As everyone knows ORBit and Bonobo have been on the deprecated list for
> a long time. I believe that the accessibility framework is one of the
> last hold-outs using the CORBA libraries, so I'd be interested in
> feedback about using D-Bus AT-SPI in future versions of Gnome.
>
> One of the major goals of the project was not to break API of the client
> side libraries. These are the accessibility libraries used by ATs such
> as Orca and GOK. The idea was to provide a seamless transition to D-Bus
> for the existing accessibility code-base. This aim has been somewhat
> successful.
>
> So far an Atk-Bridge Gtk module has been completed, allowing ATK
> applications to expose their accessibility information over D-Bus
> AT-SPI. The pyatspi client side libraries have been completed and are
> API compatible with the existing pyatspi library. The AT-SPI registry
> daemon has also been translated to D-Bus.
>
> Missing from this picture are the cspi client libraries used by GOK and
> LDTP. Cspi bindings have been started by Mike Gorse, but I am not sure
> if he will have the time to continue working on them.
>
> There is still a decent amount of work to do in making D-Bus AT-SPI
> ready for Gnome. As well as the CSpi issue there is a large problem
> regarding object lifetime. The AtkObject and CORBA AT-SPI Accessible
> interfaces expected remote reference counting of accessible objects. For
> good reasons AT-SPI D-Bus removed remote reference counting meaning it
> is not possible to access the children of some containers. The proper
> solution to this involves defining new interfaces for exposing large
> containers. There has been much discussion on g-a-devel regarding this,
> but, as yet, there has been no resolution.
>
> In the far future I would like to see changes to the client side
> accessibility APIs. I'm not a fan of Cspi, its a Glib library that
> unlike ATK is not GObject based. Pyatspi is a fine API, but both have
> the problem that they make synchronous method calls to remote processes.
>  Possibly causing deadlock, or forcing us to re-enter the main-loop.
>
> My involvement in D-Bus AT-SPI is going to continue, but as funding is
> not guaranteed in the future, my time on the project may decrease.
>
> I would like to know:
>
> How important is the removal of ORBit / Bonobo to Gnome plans?
>
> When moving to D-Bus AT-SPI how amenable are people to killing the Cspi
> library?
> (This is a nasty one. It would require major changes to GOK)
>
> When moving to D-Bus AT-SPI how amenable are people to deprecating Cspi?
>
> What do we need to do to get this in to Gnome 3.0?
>
> I'm also looking for any suggestions as to how I can encourage other
> people to help with this project. I think it could be important to
> Gnome, and as already stated, I may not be able to continue working on
> it full-time.
>
> The repository is available at:
>
> http://anongit.freedesktop.org/git/at-spi2/at-spi2-core.git
> or
> git://anongit.freedesktop.org/git/at-spi2/at-spi2-core.git
>
> A page detailing the current status of the project and instructions for
> testing is located at http://www.linuxfoundation.org/en/AT-SPI_on_D-Bus.
>
> The mailing list for the project is
> accessibility-atspi lists linux-foundation org 
>
> Thanks
>
> Mark
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