Re: Proposal: mouse-only Caribou for GNOME 2.30

[Willie Walker <William Walker Sun COM>]

Hi Ben:

I support this.

From the larger GNOME a11y point of view, we have a goal of supplanting 
AT-SPI/CORBA with AT-SPI/D-Bus.  We have about as solid as a plan as one 
can get in place with minimal funding and minimal resources to do the 
work. ;-) I wish I had buckets of money, but I don't. :-(

As you infer in your message, the biggest thing at risk in the 
AT-SPI/D-Bus port is GOK -- GOK is an extensive user of the CSPI 
bindings for AT-SPI and there are zero resources or volunteers to port 
CSPI to D-Bus.  All of the other CSPI consumers use CSPI minimally and 
have or are planning to port to D-Bus directly.

So, the upshot is that GOK will most likely end up being incompatible 
with AT-SPI/D-Bus and we need to address this.  I believe the two main 
categories of users served by GOK are mouse-only users and switch users. 
 As you mention, Caribou coupled with MouseTweaks will serve a large 
portion of the GOK users, and perhaps in a more efficient way.  So, 
you're totally rocking and heading in a great direction.

So that leaves GOK users who depend upon switch-based access.  With 
XEvIE having suffered a ill-fated death, poor GOK is being attacked on 
yet another side.  So, I think it may make sense to revisit switch-based 
access once XInput2 is more prevalent.  At that time, we may also 
investigate other new ideas for switch-based access such as Nomon, 
Jambu, etc.  Until that point, we may need to recommend that existing 
switch-based users remain on GNOME 2.28 -- I'm not sure if that's an 
acceptable thing, however, and will check.

Will

Ben Konrath wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I'm thinking about shifting the development focus of Caribou from my
> initial plan. The next stage of my plan was to start adding switch
> access scanning to Caribou which would work towards text entry
> functionality for two use cases: mouse-only users and switch-access users.
>
> Looking at other stuff going on in GNOME accessibility community right
> now, I think it makes more sense to concentrate on making a rock solid
> application for the mouse-only user case in time for GNOME 2.30. This
> will allow distros to keep the CORBA base at-spi off for mouse only
> users (including dwell click users using MouseTweaks) as well as for the
> other use cases covered by programs using pyatspi. This doesn't help
> switch only users who will still need to use the CORBA based at-api but
> at least it's a step to include more users with the DBus based at-spi.
>
> I know that I missed the official module proposal for GNOME 2.30 so
> Caribou will not be officially included but I still think there is value
> to concentrating on one user group first. And I can defintely have
> something usable for mouse-only users in time for GNOME 2.30.
>
> So what do people think? Any thoughts about this would be appreciated.
>
> Cheers, Ben
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