Rich,
There are a variety of legal interpretations and comfort levels (or
lack of comfort) around the Microsoft Community Promise language.
Depending upon how MSAA is expected to be used outside of Windows, I
suspect we aren't finished with problems/issues.
Regards,
Peter
On 7/2/2010 7:17 AM, Richard Schwerdtfeger wrote:
MSAA is now under the community promise. As long as you don't
change the API I don't see there being a problem. COM is a problem.
Rich Schwerdtfeger
CTO Accessibility Software Group
 Pete Brunet
---06/29/2010 08:33:22 AM--->UAA/IA2 is finally (active) work in
progress now Very good news Malte. Please keep us up to date a
From: Pete
Brunet <[email protected]>
To:
Cc: IA2 List
<[email protected]>
Date: 06/29/2010
08:33 AM
Subject: [Accessibility-ia2]
UAA to MSAA/IA2 Bridge
Sent by: [email protected]
>UAA/IA2 is finally (active) work in progress now
Very good news Malte. Please keep us up to date as you see fit.
Pete
===
Malte Timmermann wrote:
Hi Bill,
Pete Brunet wrote, On 06/28/10 22:48:
Hi Bill. The NVDA guys are right, i.e. IA2
is defined as a COM interface
using COM things like IUnknown, HRESULTS, BSTRS, VARIANTs, COM's
definition of arrays. Code for Linux should be using ATK/AT-SPI.
COM is one thing, the other difficulty that I see is that IA2 is not a
complete Accessibility API, but just the "missing part in MSAA/WIN32".
So if you want IA2 on non-Windows, you also need to offer MSAA, and
maybe even some other random WIN32 API.
Not sure if MSAA even had a license that would somebody allow to do
so...
the IA2 documentation says pretty
clearly that it is intended to also
run on Linux.
Where is that? I need to fix that.
Open office implements UAAPI (UNO Accessibility API). I don't remember
if there is a bridge from UAAPI to ATK. There isn't one from UAAPI to
IA2, at least at this time.
OOo has a native UAA/ATK bridge since OOo 2.0.1.
And the UAA/IA2 is finally (active) work in progress now :)
I remember Harald did something when IA2
first came out to use IA2 (and
MSAA) on Linux. I don't know any of details. They might have
transposed the IA2 IDL into something suitable for Linux or perhaps to
an intermediate form that could then be bridged to the real IA2 and to
ATK/AT-SPI.
It's been a while that I heard about this, maybe they stopped working on
it. This was before Nokia bought Trolltech/Qt.
They simply wanted to make porting of Qt Accessibility a little bit
easier with this. I never thought it would be a good idea doing it this
way...
Malte.
Pete
--
*Pete Brunet*
a11ysoft - Accessibility Architecture and Development
(512) 238-6967 (work), (512) 689-4155 (cell)
Skype: pete.brunet
IM: ptbrunet (AOL, Google), [email protected] (MSN)
http://www.a11ysoft.com/about/
Ionosphere: WS4G
Bill Cox wrote:
I've heard conflicting descriptions of
what IA2 is good for. Some
NVDA guys seem to think it's a Windows only interface, designed to get
around some limitations in the old Microsoft interface, and that
because of COM objects and other windows-specific stuff in IA2, it
will never run in Gnome on Linux. However, the IA2 documentation says
pretty clearly that it is intended to also run on Linux.
What's the actual case? Does it make any sense to port IA2 to Linux?
What would the game-plan be, and is anyone actually working on it?
Exactly which applications should we consider accessing through the
IA2 interface?
Thunderbird and Firefox both have better maintained and tested IA2
interfaces than atk interfaces. It might be a pretty good thing to
access these applications through IA2. I hear mixed stories about
OpenOffice, but a similar argument may apply.
QT is a different story. I've heard they don't use IA2 in Windows,
and that the IA2 interface is their effort to support Linux. Is this
the case? The lack of an atk QT interface may be the single strongest
argument for supporting IA2 in Gnome. However, if the QT IA2
interface is unfinished, and only meant for Linux support, wouldn't it
be simpler to modify it to use atk, rather than write an IA2 to at-spi
plugin?
So, in short, exactly what is the vision of IA2 for Linux?
Thanks,
Bill
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