[Accessibility] CSUN Proposal Draft

Olaf Schmidt ojschmidt at kde.org
Fri Sep 21 13:01:28 PDT 2007


[ Willie Walker, Fr., 21. Sep. 2007 ]
> As Olaf wrote earlier, I guess we cannot really say there has been an
> industry consensus.  But, I would say the fact that it is supported by
> GTK+, OOo, Firefox, and the Java platform does support that it is indeed
> toolkit-neutral.

I still consider "toolkit-neutral" to be misleading.

I would rather say: "AT-SPI is a solution for the GNOME desktop that 
integrates Java and OpenOffice in addition to Gtk2 applications."

I know that AT-SPI was originally designed to be toolkit-neutral, and really 
appreciate this fact. At the same time, we need to be aware that the current 
implementation has a number of both runtime and linking dependencies on 
GNOME. Most of them do not hinder the toolkit-neutral approach, but some of 
them so.

SUN and IBM have made some changes to AT-SPI during the last years that are 
important steps in the right direction, but we do not know what else is 
needed to make AT-SPI truly toolkit-neutral, since we have never documented 
the exact dependencies and whether or not they cause problems.

A good starting point for such a documentation is probably: 
http://live.gnome.org/GAP/Reengineering

But whatever the future might hold, it is still a fact that at present, the 
toolkits used by more than two thirds of all X11 applications cannot use 
AT-SPI because of technical obstacles in the API:
* gnomefiles.org lists 1855 applications (including those based on Gtk1).
* opendesktop.org lists 3020 Qt/KDE applications.
* I have no numbers for Motif or other X11 applications such as mplayer.

Olaf


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