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

Peter Korn peter.korn@sun.com
Tue, 26 Nov 2002 14:19:49 -0800


Greetings,

Just one other thing to point out in the "use ATK vs. go direct to AT-SPI"
discussion:  

Mozilla (in it's accessible UNIX guise), Gnopernicus, and GOK depend
explicitly on gobject and a number of other GNOME technologies.  If the
point of this work is to make an accessible KDE desktop, wouldn't you want
an accessible, full featured web browser as part of it?  Wouldn't you want
to use a full featured screen reader/magnifier, and a powerful on-screen
keyboard?

If you plan to package *any* of those three applications with your
accessible KDE desktop, then you are going to have to package a number of
GNOME librarie anyway.  Therefore, perhaps a packaging dependency on several
GNOME libraries for KDE's AT-SPI support (via ATK) isn't so much of an issue
after all...


Regards,

Peter Korn
Sun Accessibility team



Pupeno wrote:
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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):
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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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