[Kde-accessibility] Some AT-SPI questions

[Olaf Jan Schmidt]

Hi Leo!

Leo Spalteholz:
> I've been looking into AT-SPI lately,

Great!

> and have some (very basic) questions about writing an accessibility client
> that gathers information from AT-SPI compliant applications (much like GOK).

It is possible to talk AT-SPI directly, but this has the disadvantage that it 
will be more difficult to bridge once we move AT-SPI from CORBA to DBUS.

Most Gnome assistive technologies currently use libcspi for accessing AT-SPI, 
and our plan is to provide a similar KDE-style library later. On the 
application side, all applications currently use either atk or the Java 
Accessibility bridge. This has the advantage that it is easy to switch the 
underlying RPC mechanism as long the API is the same.

Our plan is too move AT-SPI onto DBUS once the DBUS code is in the repository 
for the KDE4 development version. This will probably also be the time when we 
start to work on the KDE equivalent to libcspi, but it might take a while to 
write all the necessary bridges to the CORBA version.

I don't know how much time I will find to work on this, so if you wish to help 
us with this, then you are highly welcome to do so. Please contact Harald 
Fernengel if you have more questions regarding AT-SPI in KDE4.

Olaf

-- 
Olaf Jan Schmidt, KDE Accessibility co-maintainer, open standards 
accessibility networker, Protestant theology student and webmaster of 
http://accessibility.kde.org/ and http://www.amen-online.de/