Re: [orca-list] IAccessible2 and Orca

[Willie Walker <William Walker Sun COM>]

Hi Isaac:

> It originated in Windows as you said (not Microsoft) 
> IAccessible2 is mentioned in the Linux context here:
>  http://www.linuxfoundation.org/en/Accessibility/IAccessible2/Overview
>
> And here in the context of multi platform accessibility API:
> http://www.linuxfoundation.org/en/Accessibility/IAccessible2/Overview

I worked with the folks doing IAccessible2 to make sure there was parity 
between the AT-SPI and IAccessible2 API's.  So, they are remarkably 
similar.  The benefit of this is that applications/toolkits wishing to 
support both AT-SPI and IAccessible2 have a bit less work to do.

> The reason I got interested is because I have tried Lotos Symphony (only the
> second application that support it fully on Windows as far as I know) and it
> works mostly well out of the box although the screen readers used JAWS and
> NVDA do not support it specifically as such - would it not be efficient to
> get cross platform accessibility?. 

I've always liked the idea of a cross platform API, and I've mentioned 
this for the past two decades I've worked in this space.  The reality, 
however, is that it's going to take a while (if ever) to get there.  The 
problem is that there is already a significant investment in supporting 
existing API's.  Asking everyone (AT vendors, toolkit providers, 
application developers, etc.) to retool everything for a common API is a 
difficult thing to swallow, as would be the idea of spending years of 
design-by-committee time to get people to agree to something.

Will