[Kde-accessibility] Timeframe for KDE 4

[Bill Haneman]

On Tue, 2006-02-21 at 12:01, Olaf Jan Schmidt wrote:
> [ Bill Haneman ]
> > I don't understand why this is, as the proposal I though we agreed to in
> > the short term bridges Qt/KDE to AT-SPI (via the atk-bridge, if I recall
> > correctly).
> 
> The atk-bridge is application side only. It is important for making KDE 
> accessible to Gnome-based assistive technologies short-term, 

That's right, I agree 100%...

> but it does not 
> help us to add AT-SPI support to KMousetool, NoKey and Gunnar's new 
> magnifier. 

It depends on what you mean by "AT-SPI" support.  Any full-featured ATs
(that is, ATs that interpose themselves between user and app for pretty
much the whole desktop experience, for instance a screen reader) will
need to be consumers of the whole AT-SPI interface, and that does mean
CORBA (via C bindings, or pyOrbit) for the medium term.  DBUS won't
really help you there.

> There is no IDL compiler for CORBA that generates Qt bindings, and 
> forcing to KDE based assistive technologies to manually bridge between 
> gobject and qobject based APIs makes no sense. Writing a new IDL compiler for 
> CORBA does not make much sense either if we can directly go for DBUS.

I don't see what you mean by "go directly for DBUS", since there will be
no assistive technology interface available in DBUS (or at least not one
that is interoperable or standardized, and not one that can work with
existing screen readers for the free desktop).

As far as working with the Gnome ATs, that can be done via DBUS as soon
as someone does the work to convert the existing "gnome"-mag, speech,
and braille APIs.  If you don't need heavy duty (i.e. non-european)
braille internationalization, brltty's brlAPI is available for braille,
and Speech Dispatcher is available for speech.  As you know we are in
discussions currently aiming to harmonize and/or merge our various
speech APIs already, which is good.   I'd like to see Gunnar's magnifier
available as a drop-in replacement for the "sample implementation" of
gnome-mag, which means (I presume) moving gnome-mag to DBUS.

> Of course full interoperability will only be available once a DBUS IDL 
> compiler has also been written for the Gnome side, but my understanding was 
> that you plan to write one anyway in the medium term perspective.

I don't plan to write one personally, no, but I think it is a
prerequisite for moving to DBUS from CORBA, since the AT-SPI interfaces
are specified as IDL.  I think there is a strong desire to do this, and
would support it, provided it means better interoperability and
cooperation on the desktop.  I am not aware of any resources dedicated
to this project at the moment, but someone may step forward and some
tentative suggestions have been made in that direction (IBM?).

Bill

> 
> 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/
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