Review LibKdeAccessibilityClient

Frederik Gladhorn gladhorn at kde.org
Thu Aug 16 08:29:27 BST 2012


Hi,
a few of us trying to improve accessibility of KDE worked on a little library, 
LibKdeAccessibilityClient.

What it does is making the AT-SPI over DBus protocol easy to use for KDE apps. 
This is the accessibility framework that we share with Gnome. It enables two 
way communication between apps and assistive tools. The first users for it 
would be the magnifiers in KWin and KMag - they can follow the focus with it. 
Further users will be screen readers and Simon with the AT-SPI plugin to 
dynamically create vocabulary for the running application's actions.

I'd like to ask for initial review in order to move this tiny lib to 
kdesupport/frameworks. It's Qt-only and actually only consists of two public 
classes. Due to the underlying AT-SPI being Linux-only it's not cross platform 
in the sense that a windows implementation would need a completely different 
backend (IAccessible(2) or UIA). At this time there is not much sense in that 
since accessibility tools on Windows are more advanced at the moment and not 
something we are interested in providing at this time.

We'll be writing up a nice tutorial on techbase the next days, for now the 
library comes with a few auto-tests and one example application that lets one 
browse the running applications accessibility interfaces.

Some of the improvements in that library were made by Amandeep as part of his 
summer of code project (with Sebastian mentoring).

Feedback is much appreciated.

Greetings
Frederik





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