[Kde-accessibility] [Accessibility] Re: D-Bus-based accessibility API

[Olaf Schmidt]

[ Willie Walker, Di., 14. Aug. 2007 ]
> Given that it sounds like the Trolltech API and the AT-SPI are identical
> for the intents and purposes of such testing, I'd guess one could pick
> several pairs of apps (one from GNOME, same sort of one from KDE) and
> conduct studies such as latency, packet size, CPU usage, memory usage
> and the user and assistive technology interact with the apps.

The difficulty, of course, is then that we are dealing with different 
applications which might have speed differences themselves. So we are not 
truly testing the speed of the API.

> Yep!  That's why I proposed/pushed for the creation of the pyatspi
> bindings and why we purposely tried to hide CORBA/ORBit/Bonobo stuff.
> Knowing the current implementation of pyatspi, I suspect it may become a
> bit of work at the pyatspi binding level to handle both the CORBA and
> DBUS solutions.

Yes, it might indeed be a bit of work, especially if we want to use both of 
them at the same time.

> Based upon the Hawaii conversations, I think the main design consideration
> was that AT-SPI would be the assistive technology API and
> splintering/subsetting/reinventing wouldn't happen. 

Trolltech is not reinventing the API - they are just using IAccessible2 as 
their main target API. 

I also have to say that I am no longer convinced that the roadmap we discussed 
in Hawaii is still the best way forward. The KDE accessibility team spent a 
lot of time coding to this roadmap last year. We began to implement an IDL 
compiler for D-Bus because we were told that this helps GNOME to make the 
port a common effort. Looking back, I am thinking that it would have been 
wiser to spent this time on other accessibility issues.

I think that the Hawaii plan would have been perfect if we had all agreed to 
implement it. But we have wasted several years failing to understand each 
other and unable to cooperate on this, and so I would advise people not to 
continue with the Hawaii road until there is a clear indication that the 
AT-SPI developer community is seriously supporting a D-Bus port.

Olaf