[Accessibility] [lsb-discuss] Motif and LSB

[Willie Walker]

Sorry if I muddy these waters a little bit...

There's some work that was done in the early 1990's for Motif that was
published informally as a v0.2 spec in 1993 and was more officially
published in 1995:

http://www-static.cc.gatech.edu/~keith/pubs/xresource-95.pdf

Phew.  It's been a while and RAP is old and outdated.  One of the core
components of RAP, however, has always been kind of a pet of mine: a
programming-language-independent *protocol* versus a
programming-language-dependent API.

I often wonder if it will ever be possible (or desirable) for graphical
platforms such as GNOME, KDE, Windows, and the Mac to agree to a common
accessibility protocol.  While I think a common solution certainly could
potentially make life easier for cross-platform application developers
(think of Firefox and its need to support both MSAA and AT-SPI) and
cross-platform assistive technology developers (do any exist?), I've
sensed a bit of resistance from others when I've broached this subject
with them.  In any case, it seems as though we may have a potentially
viable and ubiquitous transport/communication mechanism for this
protocol: web services.

Will

On Thu, 2006-11-16 at 15:46 -0500, Janina Sajka wrote:
> Alan writes:
> > > Of course, the larger issue is how prevalent this will be as we go
> > > out and talk to ISVs, particularly those coming from the Unix world.
> > > If the use of Motif is still widespread, and ISVs generally have no
> > > interest in moving to Gtk and Qt (as Adobe, Real, and others
> > > we are working with have done), then we need to find a good solution
> > > for the Motif issue. Naturally, we'll have to weigh this
> > > with the other urgent matters that we're currently dealing with too. :-)
> > > 
> > > Any thoughts on what to do here?
> > 
> > One thing to note is the status of accessibility and accessibility
> > legislation. That puts right and proper pressure on vendors to ship
> > accessible software.
> > 
> Unfortunately, there's no accessibility support in Motif. Someone else
> needs to weigh in on how difficult it might be to add a11y support, but
> I suspect it wouldn't be trivial.
> 
> 
> Janina
> 
> > _______________________________________________
> > lsb-discuss mailing list
> > lsb-discuss at lists.freestandards.org
> > http://lists.freestandards.org/mailman/listinfo/lsb-discuss
>