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Re: Accessability Interfaces

Steve Lee wrote:
Well I was really making a fairly general question ignoring the layers and agree it depends on the language or libraries you use. My question was not so much the mechanics but more what you are conceptually doing. Perhaps it is rather fuzzy distinction. It's all useful info thanks David.
My main experience is with the windows equivs of MSAA and COM. Using C you can do it the painful way of rolling all your own low level client code, you can use general classes and libraries, you can use #imports that creates classes for you from the IDL. In Python for general com you use Mark Hammond's wonderful code that creates python classes from the IDL (though event sinks are a little fidely).
From what I've seen ATK provides an abstract API devoid of CORBA details and perhaps even a little different from AT-SPI. Rather like the Python COM classes, or a library built on top of them.
Yes, but bear in mind that ATK is an in-process API and therefore is not available to assistive technologies (since they are in a separate process space from the apps which provide the ATK services). ATK is not an abstraction on top of AT-SPI, but vice-versa. 

You might find this presentation of interest:
http://www.gnome.org/~billh/ArchitecturalOverview.odp

Bill


Steve
On 11/8/06, *Bill Haneman* <Bill Haneman sun com <mailto:Bill Haneman sun com>> wrote: 

    Hi David, Steve:

    I think there are two aspects to Steve's question.  One aspect has
    to do
    with the exact API call syntax that the client uses to access AT-SPI,
    which I think is what you are referring to.  The "raw" C CORBA
    bindings
    are a bit ugly (while the python ones are elegant) but don't actually
    require the client to add any CORBA-specific code.   The second aspect
    of the question is the one I was addressing - whether the client
    needs
    to know much about CORBA details.  That also depends a little on the
    client's programming language, but mostly the answer is "no", the only
    place where the AT-SPI client has to write any CORBA code is when
    it's
    implementing the AT-SPI "EventListener" interface which it passes
    to the
    AT-SPI Registry, via which the client receives event notifications
    from
    running applications.

    best regards

    Bill

    David Bolter wrote:
    > Hi Steve,
    >
    > The at-spi hides nasty stuff like CORBA behind an API.  In early
    days we
    > used the cspi bindings (for C), but we should all now use the
    normative
    > C library libspi.  I imagine you are most interested in python
    bindings
    > -- which I haven't used (yet).
    >
    > Note, gok hasn't migrated from cspi to libspi yet (blush).
    >
    > cheers,
    > David
    > GOK Maintainer
    >
    > Steve Lee wrote:
    >
    >> Out of interest do assistive technologies (AT) get to use an
    API or
    >> library (similar to ATK for the server applications) or do they use
    >> direct CORBA calls?
    >>
    >>




--
Steve Lee
www.oatsoft.org <http://www.oatsoft.org>
www.fullmeasure.co.uk <http://www.fullmeasure.co.uk>
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