Stories from the land of Rob

Codethink will be helping to develop a replacement for AT-SPI based on D-Bus. The aim will be to make a cross-desktop accessibility framework that can be used by both Qt/KDE and GTK+/GNOME applications and other applications that currently make use of ATK. Mark Doffman will be heading up the work and is collaborating with Mike Gorse at Novell who has already started working on this, thanks to Novell’s UIA effort.

The main architectural aims will be to cut drastically the amount of of IPC used and generally be lighter than AT-SPI is at the moment. We’ll be working to support both ATK and QAccessible. I’ve applied for a project on freedesktop.org to house this, so when those are up and running that’ll be the main place for discussion. In the meantime, feel free to ask questions on the accessibility-atspi mailing list at the linux foundation or for IRC, #a11y on GIMPNet.

Update:
I should also note we will also have a very strong focus on supporting automated testing tools, so anyone out there working in that area is more then welcome to join in and tell us what needs fixing with AT-SPI.