Re: Similar accessibility solution

[Bill Haneman <bill haneman sun com>]

mongoose magic shiman com wrote:
> 
> I was curious. Have you heard of an older project called "Ultrasonix"?
> That project attempted to solve the exact same problem as ATK/SPI
> through a protocol called RAP. RAP sent data from the widgets of a GUI to
> another application, in this case a screen reader. Could this protocol be
> modified to work with SPI/ATK rather than rewriting everything?
> 

Will Walker, a key engineer on RAP, is a member of the Sun
accessibility group but unfortunately is not on this list.  RAP/ICE
was ruled out fairly early on for our solution, but I will talk to him
about this since he is a better person to explain the reasons why.  I
don't think the X screenreader effort that RAP was developed for was
particularly successful, I can't speak to that.  I think TRACE was
involved in this also.

I believe that RAP didn't provide a rich enough bidirectional
interface for one thing.  It's been a few months since we last looked
at this, so I need to refresh my memory.  Certainly the goals were
broadly similar to the SPI, but otherwise the models look rather
different.  I think that at best we would be able only to reuse the
transport layers.

Regards,

Bill

  
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Bill Haneman
Gnome Accessibility / Batik SVG Toolkit
Sun Microsystems Ireland