Announcing ATK/AT-SPI Hackfest 2012

[Piñeiro <apinheiro igalia com>]

This will come as no surprise to many of you at this point, as we
already talked about it during the weekly accessibility meetings, but
I would like to officially announce that we are having an ATK/AT-SPI2
Hackfest in January. Funnily enough one of the things to debate is if
we should kill or not ATK.

For the new people, ATK is the accessibility toolkit. Right now the
main and more extensive implementation is done on GTK+ (a isolated
module called GAIL on the past), although it is also used in Clutter
(Cally), Java (via the Java Access Wrapper), Unity and others. AT-SPI
is the accessibility service provider interface. Accessibility tools
"uses" AT-SPI in order to interact with the applications. ATK works as
the common language that target applications uses to expose themselves
to AT-SPI.

This is a follow-up of the ATK/AT-SPI hackfest that we organized on
May (2011). We gathered a lot of information on that hackfest, and
more information since then. We also worked on some aspects of that
conclusion. In the same way some new actors appeared asking new
questions. At may the main questions about the accessibility framework
was how to improve ATK, AT-SPI, the ATK/AT-SPI relationship, and
clarify and simplify the life of any ATK implementation. Now there are
new questions related if the current pair and framework is the more
suitable for our needs. And if the answer is "no", how to solve the
situation without totally break current user experience?

Who Should Attend?

  * Developers of applications and toolkits which implement ATK
  * Developers of ATK and AT-SPI
  * Developers of Assistive Technologies which rely upon AT-SPI
  * Developers of testing solutions which rely upon AT-SPI
  * Developers of Technologies used by the current framework, like DBUS

Location: Igalia (A Coruña, Galicia, Spain)
Dates: 18-22 January, 2012

For more information, including the proposed task, pre-event
"homework," venue, and associated costs, please see:

  * Live GNOME Hackfest 2012 page : 
https://live.gnome.org/Accessibility/Hackfests/ATK2012

For the moment the event is sponsored by Igalia (Venue) and the GNOME
Foundation (travel+hotel costs as far as we keep budget wise). Thank
you very much to all the sponsors. If any other company want to fund
this hackfest somehow, please contact me or Joanmarie Digss (and
thanks in advance).

Best regards

===
Piñeiro