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List:       kde-accessibility
Subject:    Re: [Kde-accessibility] Fwd: KDE Accessibility
From:       Olaf Jan Schmidt <olaf () amen-online ! de>
Date:       2002-11-27 16:40:55
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Hello Volker!

Thank you very much for your quick reply.

> One of the issues mentioned that the Qt API for accessibility support
> was not versatile enough to be used by KDE, and that the implementation
> we have would need to be extended (and implemented on UNIX). 

That was our impression, we might be wrong.

Everything we were saying was based on our unclear understanding of the 
online documentation.

> - Qt receives the WM_GETOBJECT message
> Qt uses the static function QAccessible::queryAccessibleInterface(
> QObject*, QAccessibleInterface ** ) to get hold of the accessibility
> implementation for the widget that the WM_GETOBJECT message had been
> sent to.

How does this static function know about KDE subclasses of Qt Objects? Is 
there a way to extend this functionality for all KObjects as well?

> - Additionally to that, Active Accessibility provides a notification
> mechanism that allows applications to tell accessibility clients that
> something important has changed or happend (e.g. a checkbox changed
> it's state). The static QAccessible::updateAccessibility() is provided
> for that, and a large set of "event types" (e.g. ValueChanged) is
> defined in an enum (the enum values are identical to the respective
> values in Windows, but can easily be mapped to something else).

That's good. I couldn't figure out how this works from the QAccessible 
class documentation.

We would also need information about simple things like a moved cursor.

> If it is not sufficient it is trivial to add another interface and
> implement that as well in the plugins

Great! To be honest, we are not sure ourselves what would be needed. The 
standard accessibility solution on Linux is coming from Gnome, so we have 
to learn both Qt and Gnome stuff to figure out the best way how we can 
use existing code best.

> Any RPC will do for that, and we would definitely be interested in
> putting some efforts into this (e.g. implement the server side for the
> RPC in Qt). Naturally, we would prefer this to be independent of e.g.
> CORBA ;-)

That's our interest as well. We don't use CORBA in KDE. :-)

> Well, please fwd. this to the respective lists/people. I would of
> course like to know more details about what parts seem to be
> insufficient or not flexible enough, so that we can add some fu in Qt.

We are still very much in a discussion phase and learning what Sun and the 
Gnome Accessibility Project exaclty did with their AT-SPI. It would be of 
great help if you could join the kde-accessibility mailing list 
(http://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/kde-accessibility).

> At least the implementations we provide for all the Qt widgets should
> be reusable.

My biggest question was how that is extendable to KDE subclasses and how 
to get information on a cursor movements etc.

> PS: And somebody should do something about the HTML of your webpage -
> it's somehow misformatted with IE and Mozialla ;-)

I'm currently looking into that. The autogenerated html form a dokbook 
does not find its style sheets... :-(

Olaf.

- -- 
Olaf Jan Schmidt, KDE Accessibility team

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