Re: [orca-list] pidgin 2.6.4 and orca

[Jason White <jason jasonjgw net>]

Steve Holmes <steve holmes88 gmail com> wrote:
 
> I may have brought this up before but not sure.  When bringing up
> these accessibility issues to upstream developers, what is the best
> thing to tell them to get them headed in the right direction?  What I
> mean is you can go up to someone and suggest they make their
> application "more accessible" and you might try and explain what Orca
> does but really, what facts can we give them to really get them
> going.  How does an app developer properly talk to at-spi for example?

My understanding is that GTK+ user interface components already support the
ATK interfaces, so the only requirement if they use these is to ensure that
the application can be completely operated from the keyboard.

If they write custom user interface controls, they'll have to implement ATK
interfaces.

ATK is an API used by the application which, if AT-SPI is enabled, causes
accessibility-related events to be delivered via the AT-SPI daemon to the
assistive technologies. The ATK to AT-SPI bridge runs in the same process as
the application and handles the inter-process communication with the AT-SPI
registry daemon; assistive technologies such as Orca register to receive the
events from AT-SPI and can also generate their own events.

The above is probably incomplete and may be inaccurate; it's a while since I
looked at the source code, and I mostly concentrated on the details of how
Orca worked rather than what happened on the application side. I don't know to
what extent they've changed the architecture in the transition to DBus.

I'm sure there is documentation which explains how to write applications to
support accessibility and the ATK interfaces.