[Kde-accessibility] my crazy thoughts

[Pupeno]

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I think this was all very clarified in the Olaf reply, replied by me and I 
agree with what Olaf sais, briefly:
Will make our own Accessibility framework that will be used from KDE to KDE 
(and hopefully, from Qt to Qt or KDE to Qt or Qt to KDE) wich will not 
include ATK or AT-SPI or any other code and a bridge from our framework to 
ATK  (or AT-SPI) will be done yet. I think this wasn't the original idea, but 
it is the best.
Thanks again Olaf!!!
Carpe diem!
On Wednesday 27 November 2002 05:48, Philippe FREMY wrote:
> Hi,
>
> Pupeno said:
> > The best corba implementation seems to depend on Gnome, so, using at-spi
>
> corba
>
> > direct won't save me from depending on Gnome.
>
> Is it Gnome, or just Orbit + GObject ? That's different.
>
> > I've found that ATK uses GObjects which I am still trying to understand
> > (I
> >
> > asked for help in #gnome and #gtk+ on irc.gnome.org, but I didn't get any
>
> help :| )
>
> Read the developer.gnome.org tutorials. Helps a bit.
>
> > But what really surprised me is that AT-SPI is developed in Gnome by
> > Gnome
> >
> > developers too. It is not the generic way I thought it was.
>
> I would say that ATK was introduced in Gnome by Sun, which is very
> different. Accessibility is supported by Sun.
>
> > Then I thought why is everybody else using AT-SPI when it is a Gnome
>
> thing.
>
> > Well, it seems there's no standard thing for accessibility and only a
> > free
> >
> > one developed by Gnome and the projects that are using AT-SPI and ATK (is
> > there anyone using AT-SPI without using ATK ?) are closely related to
>
> Gnome:
> > Java, developed by Sun who also is in the developing of Gnome,
> > OpenOffice,
>
> it
>
> > seems it already uses some things from GTK, I may be wrong, but
> > OpenOffice
> >
> > has Sun support, or sponsorship, well, it comes from StarOffice, a Sun
>
> I do not agree. Sun has interests in Java and in Gnome, true. It does not
> make Java related to Gnome, though. OpenOffice is developed by Sun too. So
> it seems that AT-SPI and ATK has indeed been brought not by Gnome but by
> Sun to us. And that they have chosen Gtk and Orbit as their toolkit to
> bring that.
>
> > product, isn't it ? and Mozilla was already using GTK Objects, wasn't it
> > ?
>
> I don't know about this one. Mozilla uses a generic toolkit portable to
> many platforms (XUL engine). They are certainly not using Gtk in the way
> Gnome does. In fact, there even was once a Qt port of Mozilla.
>
> If Mozilla has done things properly and I imagine they did, mozilla
> interfaces with ATK not at the level of their Gtk widgets but at a higher
> GUI level. Mozilla is supposed to have a very versatile GUI which you can
> script in many ways. I hope they have put the ATK accessbility at the
> generic GUI level.
>
> > All that implementations of ATK+AT-SPI seemed simple and logical, KDE
>
> doesn't.
>
> I think it was not as simple as it seems.
>
> > It's like asking any of those to use dcop.
> > Yes, of course, anyone can use dcop outside KDE, there's no problem, but
>
> it is
>
> > not designed to do that and there's no documentation for that, I think
>
> (even
>
> > in the dcop case, there are some tools to do scripting with dcop).
>
> You are wrong. DCOP has been designed not to depend much on KDE. It depends
> on Qt and X11 only. And some people thought about removing this dependancy
> to make it more reusable. Bindings for C and python were developed, to
> ensure that other projects could use it.
>
> > I think I'm facing a desition like the one of kde 2.0: dcop vs corba.
>
> ATK, AT-SPI or something else ?
>
> There are things you need to take into account:
>
> - standard:
> How standard is AT-SPI ? And ATK ? Two gnome programs use it already and
> they will enable access to Mozilla, OpenOffice and every Gnome application.
> Does this apply to any Gtk application ? Are there other accessibility
> toolkit apart from ATK ?
>
> It seem to me that ATK/AT-SPI is an accepted standard, even if it is new.
> If some application already use it, it would be a pity that they don't work
> with KDE. Or are you going to develop similar applications in KDE ? And if
> those helper applications are develop, they must be able to access Mozilla,
> OpenOffice and Gnome. So whatever happens, an AT-SPI access is needed.
>
> - relationship to Gnome:
> How is accessibility development related to Gnome ? Moving it to a more
> neutral place like freedesktop might help to loosen things a bit. I suppose
> the license is the LGPL.
>
> - technical:
> I suppose AT-SPI is very generic. Is it true for ATK too ? Qt has a
> promising architecture, which might be easier to use than ATK.
>
> You are facing a decision that KDE has faced a few times: do we use
> existing technologies or do we develop our own ? Many times, KDE has chosen
> its own technology: dcop and KPart vs Corba and Bonobo, KOffice vs
> OpenOffice, khtml vs Mozilla/Gecko.
>
> However, accessibility is not as simple as these other decisions. Whether
> KDE uses dcop or Corba only concerns KDE because this is internal to KDE.
> Accessibility is opening KDE to external applications. There seem to be
> existing applications that use AT-SPI to provide accessibility and there
> are projects that use AT-SPI to be accessible.
>
> We probably don't want the author of accessibility applications to write
> their applications twice, once for AT-SPI, and once for a KDE or Qt
> framework.
>
> From the information I have gathered so far, I would say that AT-SPI is
> unavoidable. You need it. And you don't have many choice to access it. It
> is either Corba or ATK, both having some drawbacks.
>
> Bill, could you clarify on the relationship between ATK and Gnome ? What
> are the applications using ATK/AT-SPI today and were they already using
> Gnome ?
>
> 	regards,
>
> 	Philippe
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
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> http://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/kde-accessibility

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