Re: [g-a-devel]Re: Proposed implementation agnostic GNOME Speech API.

[Olaf Jan Schmidt <ojschmidt kde org>]

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[Bill Haneman, Di 16.12. 2003 13:07:13]
> I already addresses the cross-desktop interoperability issue.  Also,
> remember that in the accessibility cases at least, KDE will be
> working with (and indirectly depending on) CORBA also, via its
> at-spi support layers.

This description is quite misleading, unfortunately. No KDE accessibility 
tool currently uses CORBA, and noone in the KDE project currently plans 
to use CORBA.

The Qt Accessibility Framework can be briged by Qt to ATK on Unix, MSAA on 
Windows and Apple's accessibility framework on MacOS. This way, KDE 
applications will be fully accessible via whatever native accessibility 
API is used on the host system.

If we decided to use the CORBA-based AT-SPI directly for KDE 
Accessibility, then we would loose interoperability on the native MacOS 
port of KDE.

Please note that the Qt-ATK bridge is a server side bridge only. AT 
clients based on KDE would still have to speak CORBA to connect to 
AT-SPI. This is the reason why I doubt that any KDE-based AT-SPI clients 
will be written. But since doublicating the effort of writing Gnopernicus 
or Gok or dasher is not my aim, this is OK for me. There are, however, 
some KDE developers for whom having native AT clients is important, and I 
have not yet managed to convince them to write a client side bridge from 
AT-SPI to a new KDE assistive technology API.

For text-to-speech services, using CORBA as IPC is not possible at all for 
KDE. I plan to add text-to-speech functionailty to the messaging 
framework in kdelibs, which means only DCOP or maybe later D-BUS can be 
used. Requesting CORBA usage for any application using tts is not an 
option in KDE.

While I agree that D-BUS currently is not stable enough, introducing an 
implementation independent API now would make it much easier to move to 
D-BUS once it has become stable enough.

If you wish to tie speech synthesis to CORBA on GNOME, then this is OK for 
me as long as a future transition to an implementation independent 
protocol is not completely ruled out for the case that D-BUS is being 
adopted by both KDE and GNOMEat a future point.

Olaf

- -- 
Olaf Jan Schmidt, KDE Accessibility Project
KDEAP co-maintainer, maintainer of http://accessibility.kde.org
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