[Kde-accessibility] Support for the AT-SPI D-Bus port

[Olaf Schmidt]

Hi!

The KDE Accessibility Team agrees with the general roadmap lined out in the 
following threat:
https://lists.linux-foundation.org/pipermail/accessibility/2007-December/002162.html

We consider this initiative extremely important for KDE. We have asked 
Trolltech to support it, and to get in contact with the developers as soon as 
possible. They are maintaining the accessibility framework used by KDE, which 
means that the technical details need to be discussed with them.

From the KDE point of few, the following points are of interest:
a) Users with disabilities should not be able to have a wide choice of 
applications, mixing them from different desktops, just as the other users. 
This implies that our goal needs to be to make the existing assistive 
technologies for Linux/Unix interoperate with as many applications as 
possible.
b) There are far more different types of disabilities than can be ever 
supported (not alone thought of) by one team alone. Close cooperation is 
therefore crucial.
c) The Qt Accessibility framework offers an in-process cross-platform API to 
applications. This API can be used to give Qt all the accessibility 
information that it needs to export it to assistive technologies. It is very 
close to IAccessible2, which in turn has been modelled after AT-SPI. This 
should make it easy for Trolltech to support a D-Bus port of AT-SPI.
d) The assistive technologies written by KDE are currently not using AT-SPI, 
and it is unlikely that they will make heavy use of it in the future. Some of 
them will, however, make use of simple functionality contained in AT-SPI, 
such as tracking keyboard- and mouse movements or accessibility application 
menus. We consider it best if we can do this with direct D-Bus calls.

For the KDE Accessibility Team,

Olaf Schmidt