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

[Philippe FREMY]

	Hi Pupeno,

You don't want to mess with Corba and you are right. Corba is difficult and
complex. If somebody has taken care of simplifying the API before you, not
using its work would be stupid.

My experience of working with Gtk/Gobject, is that it maps very easily to
Qt/C++ . If ATK is indeed complete, it should not be very hard to bind it to
Qt/KDE.

For the gnome dependancy, there is nothing to be ashamed of. Gnome was
indeed the first to have accessibility bindings and they seem to have done
it right. It is not surprising that we depend from them on this. Rejecting
their valuable work for a NIH syndrome would be plain stupid.

Enabling accessibility is a big task, very much needed, which you are
probably going to code alone. So you are the one who decides.

Of course, if someone wants to step up and code a corba bridge to AT-SPI,
let him do this.

Now a small technical question: can the accessbility be coded as a separate
library or will it become part of kdelib ?

	regards,

	Philippe


> -----Original Message-----
> From: Pupeno [mailto:pupeno@pupeno.com]
> Sent: Tuesday, November 26, 2002 6:09 PM
> To: kde-accessibility@kde.org
> Subject: [Kde-accessibility] AT-SPI, to ATK or not to ATK...
> 
> 
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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
> - ---
> Help the hungry children of Argentina,
> please go to (and make it your homepage):
> http://www.porloschicos.com/servlet/PorLosChicos?comando=donar
> 
> 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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