[Kde-accessibility] documentation of QAccessible and friends

[Bill Haneman]

On Wed, 2003-03-05 at 18:29, Pupeno wrote:
> ...

> > On Wednesday 05 March 2003 11:23, Pupeno wrote:
> > > I'm currently starting to write an informal text documentating as deep as
> > > I can the QAccessible classes and functionality for me, as I read the
> > > code and understand it and for everyone else intrested in reading this.

Hi Pupeno/all:

I noticed a number of questions in the documentation about how clients
obtained the accessibility information, and also as to the IPC mechanism
used.

I am pretty certain that QAccessible and its derived interfaces/classes
are connected only to MSAA, the Microsoft Windows-only accessibility
mechanism.  So the IPC is, I believe, Windows-COM, and not described in
applications-side interfaces like QAccessible.  

This means that Qt's accessibility support is currently "Windows-only". 
I am not personally familiar with the internal details of how
QAccessible is implemented - however there are very significant
limitations to MSAA which make it unsuitable for a 'complete'
accessibility API unless it is extended considerably.  So I can't give
you a good idea of how much work is required to take something like
QAccessible and make it no longer MS-specific, and bridgeable to ATK,
for instance.

One contact group that would be very helpful would be the Mozilla
'Linux/Unix' accessibility team, since they have done something very
similar to this for Mozilla.  Mozilla uses 'nsiAccessible' objects and
interfaces which were originally bridged to MSAA in much the same way
that Qt's QAccessible now seems to work.  The Sun Mozilla team (in
Beijing) took the nsiAccessible work and extended it so that it had the
additional support needed by ATK, and bridged from the original
Windows-specific interfaces to ATK.  They are still in the process of
completing this work, but they can undoubtedly give lots of very
valuable information bout how this can be done, and how much effort
might be involved.  You might email the mozilla-accessibility list first
for information, or I can give you some email contacts.

best regards,

Bill

> > > Does anybody have any resource that may help me ? (like Volker's comments
> > > in the mailing list ;) or is anybody already doing this, or intrested in
> > > this ? Thank you.
> 
> - -- 
> Pupeno: pupeno@kde.org
> KDE Accessibility co-maintainer
-- 
Bill Haneman <bill.haneman@sun.com>