Summary from the FSG Accessibility Workgroup meeting

[Olaf Schmidt]

Hi!

This is a summary of the discussions so far at the FSG Accessibility Workgroup 
meeting:

We want to have  a FSG standard on AT-SPI as soon a possible, but we also wish 
to be able to move it onto DBUS (instead of CORBA) in the future.

We agreed to standardize the AT-SPI IDL rather than the libraries, and to 
define a process to validate AT-SPI on different RPCs (Corba currently, DBUS 
in the future). This means we would have different sets of test case suites: 
The first one is based on Corba, and later a second one will be based on 
DBUS. As an interim solution, there will also be a bridge between the two.

If someone wanted to port AT-SPI to DCOP or another RPC, then it could be done 
and become part of the standard very quickly once all the conformance tests 
have been passed. But there is a great interest both from us and from the 
GNOME accessibility team to work towards a DBUS solution. In the meantime, we 
use the existing Corba implementation of AT-SPI, which has already been 
bridged to from QAccessible by Harald. This implementation will be reduced to 
glib and ORBit2 only, with no other GNOME libraries used.

This means we can standardize a working solution quickly, but we are 
future-proof and are not tied to glib and ORBit2 till eternity.

Olaf