Announcing ATK/AT-SPI Hackfest

[Piñeiro <apinheiro igalia com>]

This will come as no surprise to many of you at this point, as we
already talked about it during the weekly accessibility meetings, but
I would like to officially announce that we are having an ATK Hackfest
in May.

For the new people, ATK is the accessibility toolkit. Right now the
main and more extensive implementation is GAIL (GNOME Accessibility
Implementation Library), although it is also used in Clutter (Cally),
Java (via the Java Access Wrapper), and others. AT-SPI is the
accessibility service provider interface. Accessibility tools "uses"
AT-SPI in order to interact with the applications. ATK works as the
common language that target applications uses to expose themselves to
AT-SPI, so a deep change on ATK would require an update also in
AT-SPI. In the same way, we would like to get a one-to-one relation
between the interfaces on ATK and AT-SPI as much as possible.

Applications and toolkits do not all implement ATK consistently. This
has a negative impact on the assistive technologies ability to provide
a consistent cross-application user experience. Even in applications
and toolkits in which the ATK implementation is complete, the
information obtained from a single event and/or object is not always
sufficient for an AT client to proceed immediately; instead it is
often necessary to perform further queries and make decisions based on
heuristics rather than concrete data. This has a negative impact on
both performance and reliability.

Accessibility team has come to the conclusion that this is time to
improve on ATK no matters if that means an API break. The primary goal
is to take what we have learned from years of ATK/AT-SPI and make
things better for all involved, and create the basis of what ATK 2.0
should be.

Location: Igalia (A Coruña, Galicia, Spain)
Dates: 9-15 May

Who Should Attend?

  * Developers of applications and toolkits which implement ATK
  * Developers of ATK and AT-SPI
  * Developers of Assistive Technologies which rely upon AT-SPI
  * Developers of testing solutions which rely upon AT-SPI

For more information, including the proposed task, pre-event
"homework," venue, and associated costs, please see:

  * Live GNOME ATK Hackfest page : "http://live.gnome.org/Hackfests/ATK2011";
  * Metabug "Towards ATK 2.0 : "https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=638537";
    * Feel free to open more bugs on comment on the current ones

For the moment the event is sponsored by Igalia (Venue, part of the
food) and the GNOME Foundation (travel+hotel costs as far as the
current a11y budget allows it). If any other company want to fund this
hackfest somehow, please contact me or Joanmarie Digss (and thanks in
advance)

Best regards

===
API (apinheiro igalia com)