Thoughts on magnification

[Willie Walker <William Walker Sun COM>]

Hi All:

This is to follow up on the nice IRC discussion we had in IRC yesterday 
regarding magnification.  I think the main points were:

o The COMPOSITE extension opens the world for us to do lots and lots of 
really cool manipulation of what's being displayed on the desktop.  This 
goes well beyond bit zooming and lets us get into really neat and useful 
stuff that can benefit a larger number of disabilities.

o The architecture of the COMPOSITE extension seems to be that the most 
effective use of it is if you are in the process of the thing acting as 
the COMPOSITE manager.

o As we see with Compiz and Metacity, people seem to be centering on the 
window manager as the COMPOSITE manager.

o We have a desire to for external processes (e.g., Orca) to communicate 
with features provided by the COMPOSITE manager, such as magnification.

o We need to consider systems where COMPOSITE may not be available.

Given this, I think we agreed that the 'magnification' task is larger 
than magnification.  Maybe we need to rename it something like CIMSITY 
(COMPOSITE Interface for Magnification Services and other Interesting 
TechnologY ;-)).  Given this, I think we also tended to agree that we 
should create a growable API that starts off by supporting at least what 
we need for magnification, but which will also eventually allow us to do 
other really really cool stuff.  This API (most likely DBus based?) 
would need to be supported by at least Metacity and ideally Metacity and 
Compiz.

Does that sound about right?  If so, this still seems like a pretty 
tractable problem that seems to fit well within the GNOME Outreach 
Program and which also provides great support for a large number of 
assistive technologies.

What are your thoughts?

Will