[Kde-accessibility] Project Announce: AT-SPI D-Bus

[Mark Doffman]

Hi Olaf,

Sorry for my late reply. Busy two weeks.

> this project announcement is phantastic news.
> 
> The D-Bus port of AT-SPI is a crucial building block to move KDE accessibility 
> forward.
> 
> It has long been my dream to have a common accessibility stack shared between 
> KDE and GNOME. I always originally lacked technical background knowledge to 
> move this forward myself, and when I had learned more about accessibility, I 
> was increasingly too much short of time.

Its very much my dream now also.

> 
> In the last years, KDE developers have often asked me where to start when 
> dealing with accessibility. I have then given them a few general rules (no 
> hardcoded colours and sizes, no reliance on mouse usage, etc) but was unable 
> to point them to a good starting point for assistive technology support.
> 
> One way to go could be testing tools and/or a tutorial on AT-SPI D-Bus usage. 
> Do you think such an approach would work to lower the entry barrier?

Yes, a tutorial would be a great idea. The GNOME project recently
updated their Accessibility pages and they are looking pretty good.
http://library.gnome.org/devel/accessibility-devel-guide/nightly/gad-overview.html.en
Is a very decent (Quick) overview of how people can make sure their
applications are accessible. The page makes a few good points:

1 - If your application uses standard GTK widgets then you will probably
have to do little or nothing to make the application accessible.

This is really what we need to be aiming for for the QT widget set. In
terms of translating between QAccessible and AT-SPI I don't forsee too
many problems. QAccessible is apparently MSAA based. I think ATK might
once have been too, and AT-SPI is a heavily re-dressed ATK.

2 - If your application uses custom widgets, you may have to do some
work to expose those widgets' properties to assistive technologies.

This is really a big problem these days. A-lot of people are using
custom canvas-based widgets in their applications, and this is where
things start getting really inaccessible.

For people who are creating highly custom widgets need to be reminded
(Forced) to implement all the neccessary QAccessible Interfaces on it.

As for an application used for testing, there was an accessibility
introspecter created for QT D-Bus accessibility, but in reality
Accerciser is far more complete and mature. Unless there are real
objections to using it I think Accerciser should be reccommended.

Sidenotes -

Oddly enough KDE pages have the best GNOME accessibility architecture
overview out there. Kudos to whoever wrote this:

http://accessibility.kde.org/developer/atk.php

I will make the QT implementation I have so far public over Christmas.
I'll do a quick announce once I have.

Thanks

Mark