[Kde-accessibility] OpenOffice and KDE4 Accessiibilty [was: Orca/KDE Integration]

[Bill Haneman]

Thanks Olaf;

Eric - I understand and agree with some of what you said, but I think 
you may have missed some of the point.  Running OpenOffice.org without 
gtk+ would be desirable for KDE, that's not quite what we're talking 
about.   The issue of GTK+ is separable from the issue of using ATK for 
OOo accessibility, since ATK does not link to or otherwise pull in 
GTK+.  It pulls in glib and pango, but by comparison with the other 
gtk+/gnome dependencies this is very lightweight indeed!

Until fairly recently OOo used Java for all of its accessibility 
support.  On Windows this will continue to be the case.  There are 
indeed many downsides in using Java for this, which is why the OOo team 
changed the Linux/Unix implementation to use ATK instead.  However, if 
for some reason KDE doesn't want OOo to use ATK when running in the KDE 
environment, reusing the already-existing Java accessibility code in OOo 
may still be the best alternative. 

Also, realize that because OOo is based on its own custom widget set, 
moving the accessibility support to QAccessible would not just be a 
matter of porting to Qt, it would be considerably more work than that.  
It's not clear to me that the result would actually do what you want or 
need, since the QAccessible API seems to provide only a subset of what 
AT-SPI needs for comprehensive assistive technology support, at least at 
the moment.  Certainly until full-featured KDE-based assistive 
technologies come on line (which will take some time), it makes sense to 
reuse the existing code base and interfaces so that OOo can continue to 
work with orca, gok, gnopernicus, dasher, etc. under the KDE environment.

Best regards,

Bill


Olaf Jan Schmidt wrote:

>Hi Éric!
>
>Yes, using Gtk instead of Qt for accessibility would only be  ashort-term 
>solution. As a KDE developer, I totally agree.
>
>But Bill's suggestion to keep using atk (and glib) makes sense. I am not sure 
>whether you would need Java in that case - that depends very much on the 
>OpenOffice internals.
>
>Anyway, it is not totally clear yet how exactly the accessibility framework 
>will look like in KDE4. KDE, GNOME, Trolltech and other players are currently 
>in a very intensive discussion about this. It is therefore way too early to 
>say what the best approach for OpenOffice will be. But we will keep you 
>informed.
>
>Olaf
>
>  
>