Re: [orca-list] Gnome and KDE accessibility

[Willie Walker <William Walker Sun COM>]

Jason White wrote:
> The accessibility support that TrollTech implemented and announced last year
> used d-bus however, which thus appears to be the direction in which they are
> headed in QT 4, unless this has been reconsidered more recently.

Under funding from the Mozilla Foundation, the folks at Codethink have 
done a pretty independent analysis of porting AT-SPI to DBus:

http://blogs.sun.com/wwalker/entry/at_spi_over_dbus_investigation

I believe at least one of the Schmi Dt brothers 
(http://behindkde.org/people/gunnar/) was present at the meetings to 
discuss this, and I think they generally support the notion that if this 
is done, it would be the thing KDE will use.

> In general, I don't understand what ATK gives an application that ATSPI can't,

ATK provides this kind of abstract peering model for toolkit objects and 
there's also a ATK bridge to speak AT-SPI.  So, the basic idea is that 
the toolkit creates accessible peers for GUI components via ATK and the 
ATK bridge exposes that to the world via AT-SPI.  With this model, the 
peering complexity is managed by the toolkit.  The IPC mechanism is 
managed by the bridge, simplifying the gunk in the toolkit.  As a 
result, we see things like GTK+, Firefox, and OOo all using ATK.

> > The comments about solaris was to do with solaris being a Sun product
> > and orca being part of the Sun accessibility project (I believe) so
> > potentially could be seen in the light of Sun trying to meet legal
> > requirements.

If you've ever met the Orca team, you'd know our passion goes well 
beyond the 8AM-5AM Mon-Fri job.  I don't even know what it is like to 
work like that anymore.  A 40 hour work week?  That == vacation to me.

Will