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

[Bill Haneman]

On Tue, 2002-11-26 at 18:22, Pupeno wrote:
...

> > You might not want KDE to call
> > directly into ATK API (though there are also advantages to this), and I
> > assure you that this separation could be maintained everywhere but
> > inside the accessibility libraries themselves.
> Well, I should see the advantages and disadvantages of having the 
> accessibility code in kde's core or not. It wouldn't be a problem for 
> compiling, if ATK is not found is not compiled, simple, but it would be a 
> problem for packaging. Do you have any idea of the advanteas of calling ATK 
> API directly from KDE core ?

Well, in many cases the accessibility of applications can be greatly
improved if the application can set some special accessibility
properties or call some application-side accessibility APIs.  ATK was
designed to be a "read/write" API in many places, so that applications
can "do the right thing".  An alternative would be to use or extend
existing properties in Qt and/or KDE to do this, then bridge those
properties to ATK, but some of the properties might be a little more
complicated than others to map onto Qt.  ATK already provides
implementation code for this, you don't have to use it or expose it in
your KDE apps but if you don't you'll need another mechanism for doing
things like setting "accessible name" and "accessible description", or
"relationships" between different UI elements.


> Oh, ok, if you say so, I didn't check this issue yet, I was based on your own 
> words. So, if you say ATK completly implements all that is needed from 
> AT-SPI, I'll take your word as true. :)

Well, there are always things that get forgotten, but I think the
statement is nearly 100% true for the moment ;-)
 
> > But of course ORBit2 links to glib, and many other
> > parts of GNOME...
> I see, good point, thank you for showing that up.
> Why does ORBit2 depends on glib ? (just curiosity).

I am not sure, mostly to avoid duplication of code I think, since an
object model is something an ORB would need, along with lots of portable
utility functions from glib.

> If I'm going to choose to go with ATK (as it seems I'm going to do) I'd like 
> to know about ATK development cycle, anything you could tell me would be 
> usefull (I'm running out of time, but later, I'll suscribe to gnome mailing 
> lists about this). Specially, I'd like to know how ATK is released and/or how 
> is going to be released.

At the moment it's released with GNOME 2.X, and with GTK+.  Like pango,
it can be used outside of GTK+ but since GTK+ depends on it, it tends to
get associated and distributed with GTK+.

You can download the separate packages for glib and ATK from
ftp.gnome.org I believe.  The current ATK version is 1.1.3.

-Bill

> Thank you.
> - -- 
> Pupeno: pupeno@pupeno.com
> http://www.pupeno.com
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