Re: [g-a-devel] GTK and ATK

[Piñeiro <apinheiro igalia com>]

On 05/13/2011 04:48 PM, Matthias Clasen wrote:
> On Thu, May 12, 2011 at 5:25 AM, Piñeiro<apinheiro igalia com>  wrote:
> > On 05/11/2011 02:57 PM, Benjamin Otte wrote:
> >
> > Well most of the paragraphs were already answered by Brian, but I would like
> > to add a comment here.What concerns me a lot is that there is only very few
> > applications
> >
> > > that actually make use of this huge abstraction layer that is AT-SPI.
> > > I'm often thinking that we would have less code to maintain if we
> > > indeed wrote Orca code once for every toolkit we target Orca at
> > > instead of having to maintain a big ATK interface for every toolkit.
> > > (And the same for the other few applications that have accessibility
> > > requirements.) But of course I have no idea if that is actually true,
> > Well, there are some issues with this proposal:
> >   * It is true that right now the AT more mature and maintained is Orca, but
> > we still have other AT tools, like Caribou, Dasher (if it migrates to
> > libatspi), MouseTrap/OpenGazer, Gnome Shell magnifier (Joseph is planning to
> > use some AT-SPI features).
> One thing that would be very instructive would be to make a little
> table to show which of these technologies use/need what parts of the
> atk interfaces. I don't think the magnifier needs any really, for
> example. And for the others, probably only orca needs text and
> navigation support. dasher and caribou are much closer to input
> methods and could probably get away with just using im interfaces

Yes, this kind of table would be instructive. Some quick comments (although
a exhaustive investigation would found more requirements):

The magnifier requires it for focus-tracking. As I said Joseph was planning
to try to use some at-spi functionalities on the gs magnifier. As right now
at-spi2 python bindings are created with gobject introspection, in theory it
could be possible to have also javascript bindings, and call them from gs
magnifier code.

AFAIK, dasher and caribou although were using at-spi for focus-tracking,
although in the case of Dasher this is an optional feature.

BR

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