Re: desktop-devel-list digest, Vol 1 #2110 - 16 msgs

[James Henstridge <james daa com au>]

On 30/03/04 01:27, Bill Haneman wrote:

> Jamesh said:
>
> > Without knowing what the Accessible::Document interface would look 
> > like, I can't say whether at-spi would be any better or worse. The 
> > current interfaces appear to only mirror the GUI (view) portion of an 
> > app, which is of limited use for scripting. There are probably other 
> > options available too. My point is that telling people to use one 
> > interface for scripting small programs, and a completely different 
> > API for scripting their larger office programs seems a bit confusing. 
> > James. 
>
> One thing to remember is that at-spi is designed to expose UI, which 
> isn't necessarily "GUI".  So the at-spi interfaces can easily be used, 
> with only trivial extension, to expose a non-graphical interface.  
> Doing this in a reasonably consistent way across applications would 
> require some planning, but I don't think the at-spi interfaces would 
> have to be abused in order to make this work.
>
> In general, assistive technologies only expose AT-SPI interfaces that 
> _are_ visible/mapped somehow to the GUI, but this is only to prevent 
> hidden objects from being exposed to users inappropriately.  This also 
> means that if 'hidden' at-spi implementors are added in a consistent 
> way to applications, possibly with the addition of one or two 
> ATK/at-spi STATE values or conventions, such scripting support would 
> not conflict with existing accessibility features.  Such an approach 
> would probably enhance accessibility in some situations, as has 
> already been suggested.
>
> One reason why we didn't tie at-spi explicitly to graphical UI 
> components only is because some applications and desktop services may 
> present "interfaces" that aren't graphical (for instance, audio device 
> control via acme).  It seems to me that the sorts of desktop services 
> that need to be scriptable fall nicely into this category.

I don't doubt that the accessibility interface could be used to expose 
the "model" of an application.

But if we are considering AT-SPI as a scripting interface, we need to 
look at ease of implementation.  I am not convinced that it would be any 
easier for an app author to maintain a tree of AtkObjects representing 
their document model compared to exposing it via custom CORBA 
interfaces, DBus, etc.

James.

--
Email: james daa com au
WWW:   http://www.daa.com.au/~james/