[g-a-devel] Refactoring Orca to be less GUI/DE independant.

[Luke Yelavich <luke yelavich canonical com>]

Hey folks,
I originally intended to raise this at the most recent a11y meeting, however due to my own carelessness, I 
ended up missing that meeting, my apologies.

I'm going to be working towards getting some form of screen reader accessibility into the Ubuntu touch 14.04 
release. THis is a release that will be usable on all currently available nexus devices, and will be a base 
for phone vendors to release phones using Ubuntu.

As we all know, Orca currently uses GTK rather heavily, mostly for its preferences window, but also for 
visually indicating flat review cursor location on screen, and there may be more which I am not currently 
aware of. The Ubuntu touch release will not be shipping with GTK, nor X, and will be using Qt, and Mir, a 
Canonical developed display technology, similar to Wayland.

In addition, it will be necessary to write some form of configuration UI, which will be integrated into the 
Ubuntu touch main system settings application, as part of the accessibility settings panel. So it will also 
be necessary to expose some form of interface to allow Orca's configuration to be changed, and to be done so 
whilst Orca is running. I know this has somewhat been on the Orca roadmap for a while, given the desire to 
ship Orca configuration as part of GNOME control center.

I'm aware that Orca stores its configuration in a json file, so one solution could be to use a json library 
to write out the config file, but should Orca change its configuration storage in the future, this would mean 
much code needing to be rewritten. My thought is that we could move Orca's configuration management into a 
GObject introspected
 library, which Orca itself could use, and which would be easily consumable by anybody else who wanted to 
write Orca's configuration. The library could also assist with the process of signalling a running Orca to 
reload its config, most probably DBus.

I'll be able to assist with whatever solution is eventually agreed upon, so actually getting the work done is 
not likely to be a problem.

I'd appreciate people's thoughts or suggestions should they have any better ideas.

Luke