[Kde-accessibility] Questions regarding AT-SPI and ATK

Bill Haneman bill.haneman at sun.com
Fri Aug 22 15:56:01 CEST 2003


On Wed, 2003-07-30 at 08:24, Padraig O'Briain wrote:
> ATK depends only on glib.
> 
> I have noticed that AT-SPI has dependencies on gtk+ and gail. I am not sure why 
> the dependency on gial is there. As for gtk+, it is used in some of the test 
> programs. It is also used in the directory atk-bridge which builds a GTK module 
> which is loaded into programs at initialization to provide accessibility 
> support. If KDE were to use AT-SPI it would need a similar mechanism.

Note that this is now a "g-module" not a gtk-module, gmodule support is
part of the glib package.

Note this this is a build-time dependency on the at-spi package, which
is quite different from a runtime dependency of a library.  The
libraries from the at-spi package which would be needed by KDE
accessibility integration do not, as far as I know, introduce gtk+
dependencies, and they certainly do not need gail.  As was alluded to
before, the GAIL dependency at build time is presently only a sanity
check to make sure the user of at-spi has some sort of accessibility
implementation present.  Personally I don't think the gail dependency in
configure.in is appropriate but some contributors felt strongly
otherwise, and it does help prevent some erroneous bug reports that
might result if builders of at-spi did not notice the dependency when
reading the docs.

- Bill

> 
> Padraig
> 
> > > 5. In order to get an acceptable solution for KDE we have to evaluate the
> > > dependencies of those parts of the GNOME Accessibility Architecture that 
> > > will be used within KDE. When looking at ATK and the broker I fear that 
> > > both will most likely have too much dependencies. However, as we currently 
> > > do not have a clear position of KDE to AT-SPI, so I cannot say which 
> > > dependencies will be OK and which have to be changed.
> > > 
> > > If what I heard is correct the ATK dependencies are due a dependency on 
> > > GAIL which was introduced in order to force the user to have a working
> > > architecture once ATK is installed. This dependency on GAIL pulls a
> > > dependency on GNOME into ATK and should be avoided if we decide to use ATK 
> > > in KDE.
> > 
> > Hmmm... Perhaps Padraig or someone else can speak to this, but I didn't
> > think that ATK depends upgon GAIL.  The reverse is true.
> > 
> 
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