Re: [g-a-devel]Porting At-SPI to Mac OS X

[Peter Korn <Peter Korn Sun COM>]

Bonjour Bernard,

gnome-accessibility-devel bernard-hugueney org wrote:
>
> I was wondering about the work needed to port At-SPI to Mac OS X.
> I'd guess At-SPI sould be fairly straightforward, and a bridge between
> some native Aqua[1] accessibility API (I hope there is one:-) ) and
> At-SPI ( a la gnome-java-bridge) would be the main work.
> 
> Surely somebody on the list must have a more informed opinion ?

The two APIs for programming the Mac these days are Carbon and Cocoa.  In
theory, you could run the AT apps on the Mac in an X environment with Java
apps, GTK+ apps, and perhaps without too much work Mozilla and
OpenOffice.org apps (once OpenOffice.org 1.1 is ported to the Macintosh). 
In practice, this first step would probably run into several hurdles. 
These include the Macintosh X window manager (which may not implement all
of the modern calls that at-spi uses - I just don't know one way or the
other), potential ORBit interoperability issues when it comes to use with
Java and OpenOffice.org, some minor serial port wierdness for Braille (and
of course porting BrlTTY will be another issue), potential USB wierdness
for GOK input devices, and a host of miscellaneous things I haven't
thought of.

The second big step is integration with Macintosh applications (using
either Carbon or Cocoa).  There is a Carbon accessibility API (see
http://developer.apple.com/documentation/Carbon/Accessibility-date.html)
and also one for Cocoa (see
http://developer.apple.com/documentation/Cocoa/Conceptual/Accessibility/).
Macintosh accessibility is discussed on the mailing list
accessibility-dev lists apple com (join this list via the web interface at
http://www.lists.apple.com/mailman/listinfo/accessibility-dev).  There are
two big issues to solve here.  #1 is reaching API parity.  When I last
looked (quite some months ago), there was still a lot missing from the
Apple accessibility APIs that is in at-spi and that our two assistive
technologies take advantage of.  #2 is figuring out a bridging mechanism. 
Do you use CORBA?  Do you use some other IPC mechanism for marshaling
objects?


Are you serisouly interested in taking on this project?  It would be a
tremendous thing to have.


Regards,

Peter Korn
Sun Accessibility team