Re: Accessibility for remote applications.

[Bill Haneman <Bill Haneman Sun COM>]

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>From: mcnichol austin ibm com
>To: gnome-accessibility-list gnome org
>Subject: Accessibility for remote applications.
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>Date: Tue, 15 Oct 2002 10:32:48 -0500
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>Hi Gnome Accessibility Group,
>
>This is probably a silly question, but I just need to confirm this...
>
>Say you are running a desktop with Gnome Accessibility technology
>(say for instance a screen reader like Gnopernicus).  Then you launch
>a Gnome app from a remote system on the network and display it on your desktop.
>
>Will the screen reader be able to perform its job with the remote
>app the same as it does with any local apps?

Hi Dan:

In theory, yes, since the accessibility APIs are network-transparent. 

However there are a couple of gotchas in practice that will prevent this from working right away.  
The main issue is that we (GNOME 2) don't have a standard means of "remote activation".

Accessible applications try to contact the "accessibility registry" on startup, to register 
themselves, via "bonobo-activation".  The registry is a CORBA object which is contacted via its 
IOR, but the current generation of bonobo-activation has no means of discovering remote bonobo 
services.

A means of doing remote activation which would return the IOR of the user's desktop accessibility 
registry would be all that is required here; once the registry has been found, the remote 
application (and the local screenreader) can communicate transparently with one another (with, of 
course, some changes in latency ;-)

The 'remote activation problem' is a topic of current discussion in GNOME, you might check the 
archives of deskjtop-devel-list gnome org 

best regards,

Bill

>Thanks
>Dan
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------
Bill Haneman x19279
Gnome Accessibility / Batik SVG Toolkit
Sun Microsystems Ireland