[Kde-accessibility] Use of gconf key '/desktop/gnome/interface/accessibility' on KDE ?

[Bill Haneman]

Hi Ashu:

Currently the state of KDE accessibility is somewhat limited.  Other
than some important theming and keyboard-navigation support, which does
not require a complex interface such as AT-SPI, there are only a few
useful utilities like KMag, KMouth, and KMousetool.  While these are
nice utilities, they aren't enough to allow users who cannot use a
keyboard at all, or who are blind or have very limited vision, to use
KDE.

We have three working screen readers (for blind users) for the free
desktop now; gnopernicus, orca, and LSR.  For users who cannot use a
keyboard, we have GOK and Dasher.  All of these technologies require the
full power of the AT-SPI interfaces, and thus require the ORBit2 CORBA
stack in order to work.  The gconf key you mention is for determining
whether support for such full-features assistive technologies should be
enabled or not.

When KDE/Qt applications provide full-featured accessibility services,
as is planned for Qt4, then those services can be bridged to AT-SPI,
making those applications available to screen readers and other sorts of
"user interface adapting" assistive technologies.  

While it would be possible to write a "KDE" screen reader or KDE
onscreen keyboard for severely disable users (for instance users who
cannot even 'point and click' reliably), I don't think it would be the
best use of our resources.  Technologies like Orca are intended to work
with AT-SPI-enabled KDE apps just as they work with applications like
OpenOffice, Java apps, Firefox, and other applications today, not just
"gnome".  By writing Orca scripts for popular KDE applications, the KDE
desktop, and by fixing the inevitable bugs in KDE's keyboard navigation
and accessibility support, a modest amount of development effort can go
further to benefit disabled users.

best regards

Bill

On Mon, 2006-06-26 at 13:30, Ashu Sharma wrote:
> On 6/26/06, Bill Haneman <Bill.Haneman at sun.com> wrote:
>         On Mon, 2006-06-26 at 08:19, Ashu Sharma wrote:
>         > Hi,
>         >
>         > There was discussion about making use of ATK on KDE, rather
>         than
>         > putting in another CORBA implementation to talk to AT-SPI
>         (to avoid
>         > dependency on GNOME-related libraries). I'm not quite clear
>         as to what 
>         > was finally decided.
>         
>         If KDE writes to ATK, it makes the job easier in a number of
>         ways (at
>         the cost of introducing a glib dependency, but hiding other
>         gnome-ish
>         dependencies).  However, the AT-SPI layer requires CORBA in
>         order to 
>         function, so in order to actually expose useful information to
>         our
>         assistive technologies, an application must LD_PRELOAD the
>         "atk-bridge"
>         module which bridges from ATK to AT-SPI's CORBA IPC.
>         
>         I think this is the most effective thing to do for the time
>         being 
>         (preload atk-bridge), since it doesn't introduce a CORBA
>         dependency on
>         the KDE apps (only a soft runtime dependency).  The AT-SPI
>         assistive
>         technology clients cannot work without the AT-SPI/ORBit2/etc.
>         libraries 
>         being present on the system anyhow, so from a practical
>         perspective this
>         is the minimum current dependency situation.
>         
>         There's another environment variable you can look for if you
>         don't want
>         to use gconf; GTK_MODULES.  Of course that's still quite a 
>         gnome/gtk+-ish variable and arguably not appropriate to KDE
>         anyhow, so
>         it might be cleaner just to spawn a gconf-client executable
>         and parse
>         the output, in order to detect whether assistive technology
>         support is 
>         desired or not.  Also, soon there will be a slightly different
>         mechanism
>         for detecting the presence of the AT-SPI registry - it will
>         place an IOR
>         as an Xatom on the root DISPLAY window.  This means you can
>         find it 
>         without using bonobo-activation.
>         
>         regards
>         
>         Bill
>         
>         >
>         > On a related note, is the gconf
>         > key '/desktop/gnome/interface/accessibility' used on KDE
>         too, to set
>         > or find if accessibility support is to be enabled on a
>         system? Or, is 
>         > it used only on GNOME?
>         >
>         > Thanks,
>         > Ashutosh
>         >
>         >
>         ______________________________________________________________________
>         > _______________________________________________
>         > kde-accessibility mailing list 
>         > kde-accessibility at kde.org
>         > https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/kde-accessibility
>         
> 
> 
> Bill,
> Thanks for these details. 
> I am actually wondering about the current state of KDE accessibility -
> whether AT clients under KDE currently depend on gnome/gconf libraries
> (especially if they use the gconf key
> '/desktop/gnome/interface/accessibility' to enable AT support) .
> Thanks,
> Ashutosh
> 
> 
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