[Kde-accessibility] AT-SPI, to ATK or not to ATK...

Pupeno pupeno@pupeno.com
Tue, 26 Nov 2002 12:09:28 -0500


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Well.
In the last meeting on IRC I was selected to be in charge to organize the
efforts to implement AT-SPI on KDE.
For the ones who couldn't assist or want to make a review of what AT-SPI is
and what ATK is, and have the whole picture, please, go to
http://accessibility.kde.org/events/meeting1/AT-SPIAndATK.html and some more
is written by Olaf in http://accessibility.kde.org/developer/
The question is simple, we have two options.
Go directly to AT-SPI, and having to deal with CORBA, which seems to be
complex (I don't know about CORBA, can anybody experienced in this give me an
overview of how complex CORBA is ?) or we can use ATK (which is much simpler
than CORBA acordding to Bill).
The problem with ATK is that is part of the gnome project (and is gobject
based) so, that will make KDE dependant on Gnome, or at least, KDE
Accessibility dependant on Gnome's libs, the advantage is that ATK is much
simpler to code and the ATK->AT-SPI is already working (acording to BILL).
The other disvantage I may see on this aproach is that we would like to have
a diferent aproach than ATK, add something, etc, etc. ATK doesn't implement
all the functionality that AT-SPI implements. I don't think we'll need
something that ATK doesn't provide, but if we do, we'll be stuck.
The problem of going directly with CORBA is that CORBA is too complex and I
don't want to be lost in a huge problem. KDE Accessibility would depend on
Corba, but depending on Gnome it depends on CORBA anyway. The advantage here
is the dependency of ATK/Gnome and the posibility of use another architecture
diferent to ATKs.
So, I think this decition will depend in a lot of things, including, how many
people want to work on implement this... if I'm alone, or alone with Gunnar
(wich is already working on other things as well as I am) going with CORBA,
something I don't know and I belive that Gunnar doesn't know either will be a
very hard task.
So, I'd like to like your opinions and points in this issue.
If necesary, I may take this conversation to kde-core-devel as there will be a
lot of people that knows about CORBA and people who may tell us how bad or
how not bad may be in using ATK. (If later we found that some parts of KDE
Accessibility has to go inside KDE core's and that that's the best
architecture, will be stuck with the options of being forced to choose a bad
architecture or make KDE core's depend on Gnome's core).
Thank you.
- --
Pupeno: pupeno@pupeno.com
http://www.pupeno.com
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PS: couldn't we 'simple' port ATK to KDE ? making KATK, KDE Accessibility 
ToolKit (let's remove the last K, KAT, nice, hu ?)

PSPS: does anybody know where the AT-SPI documentation can be found ?
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