On Wed, 2006-07-19 at 17:01, Shaun McCance wrote: > Hey Bill, > > As usual, I'm afraid most of us don't understand all the layers > as well as we ought to. Could you clarify exactly which pieces > of the accessibility stack wouldn't get activated? There are > a lot of GTK-only applications, probably a couple inside Gnome. > What are these applications missing out on?
For now, as "pure gtk+" apps are relying on gnome-session to set the GTK_MODULES environment variable to load the modules "gail" and "atk-bridge". This is not really optimal but it works well enough for gtk+-only apps (some apps that use gtk+, such as mozilla/firefox, have to take measures to un-set this variable and do their own accessibility work based on the gconf key). What we really want is for all desktop apps to have a way of detecting the need for assistive technology support without having the environment tell them what modules they must load in order to get it - in this sense the GTK_MODULES solution makes the apps accessible "as a side effect", rather than providing clear semantics as does gconf. A boolean XSETTING would probably be nicer since it would allow apps to make their own decisions on what modules should be loaded in order to enable assistive technologies. This would mean that gtk+ would incur a soft dependency on libgail and at-spi which it currently does not have, but at this stage in the history of ATK this would probably be acceptable. It has been proposed that gail be rolled into gtk+ at some point, which would be very helpful (as a separate module, it can be very awkward to poke into gtk+ widgets to the extent necessary in order to implement ATK on their behalf). The $GTK_MODULES approach also fails for embedded apps and things that use gtkplug/gtksocket, since for those apps an additional module (libgail-gnome) must be loaded - unless we don't mind pure gtk+ apps loading that module needlessly. regards Bill > -- > Shaun > > _______________________________________________ desktop-devel-list mailing list desktop-devel-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list