[Kde-accessibility] Some AT-SPI questions

[Olaf Jan Schmidt]

Olaf Jan Schmidt:
> AT don't use the atk bridge. Today, you need to either use cspi or at-spi
> directly.

I meant to say:

AT clients do not use the atk bridge, which is application-side only.
The AT clients that exist today either use the cspi library or the generated 
CORBA-AT-SPI bindings from the IDL compiler.

Using one of these APIs in a Qt application only makes sense if we use an 
additional bridge that maps the gobject-based API to QObject. For this reason 
I recommend using them only for glib-based AT clients.

If we want to get rif of this additional bridge and glib/ORBit2 dependency, we  
have two options, as Bill pointed out:

1. We could write an IDL compiler for DBUS. Such a compiler would need to have 
at least two modes (C/glib mode and C++/Qt mode).

2. On the glib/Gtk/GNOME side, the ORBit2 library could be changed to use DBUS 
internally. On the Qt/KDE side, we will already decided to do the same with 
DCOP. If we manage to coordinate this properly, then we can two fully 
compatible bindings for DBUS-AT-SPI, one C++/Qt/DCOP-style, the other 
C/glib/CORBA-style.

In the second scenario, the best way to generate the Qt-style bindings for 
DBUS-AT-SPI is still to have an IDL compileer generating the API, but if it 
takes a while to write this, then we could also start with hand-written 
bindings.

If Leon wants to start working on at-spi support now, then he can either write 
a bridge for temporary use until an IDL compiler for DBUS has been written, 
or cooperate with Harald in creating the proper Qt-bindings for DBUS-AT-SPI. 
This depends a bit on whether he wishes to have a working version of AT-SPI 
support in his application soon, or whether he wishes to help KDE writing the 
general framework that needs to be created for Qt/kdelibs-based AT-clients.

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/