From kde-accessibility Tue Jan 15 19:01:05 2008 From: Olaf Schmidt Date: Tue, 15 Jan 2008 19:01:05 +0000 To: kde-accessibility Subject: [Kde-accessibility] Support for the AT-SPI D-Bus port Message-Id: <200801152001.07258.ojschmidt () kde ! org> X-MARC-Message: https://marc.info/?l=kde-accessibility&m=120042372617225 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 _______________________________________________ kde-accessibility mailing list kde-accessibility@kde.org https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/kde-accessibility