From: Bastien Nocera <had...@hadess.net> CCing gnome-accessibility list, as probably I will forgot several things.
> - a11y instant-on (if not instant-off) > a11y is enabled in applications when the XSettings mention that the GTK+ > modules should be loaded. We could make GTK+ programs instant-apply the > XSettings (what applications would be breaking? Could we whitelist a11y > to be the only one auto-loaded? Can we make the change for GTK+ 3.0?) > > The other problem is that application need to initialise themselves, and > register with the at-spi bus to appear in things like screen readers. > > Could somebody with more knowledge on the subject tell me what changes > would be necessary for a11y to become instant-apply? The initalization can be done at any moment (and as you said, made by the application themselves). Right now gtk apps require to load gail and atk-bridge modules, so they just need to load this modules using gmodule, and then call the method gtk_module_init (although the method gnome_accessibility_module_init is also provided). At this moment, to made that more easy, this is done during the gtk_init, as it load the gtk modules reading the envar GTK_MODULES (as far as I undertand, the idea now is avoid that and start to use XSettings). About the unload, there are also a method gnome_accessibility_module_shutdown (but not gtk_module_shutdown one), so it would be just call this method and unload the modules. So in theory, no changes should be required from the a11y modules, except, perhaps, add a gtk_module_shutdown method, in order to be more general. In the gtk side, I don't know much about the XSettings, but I suppose that you are talking more general, and XSetting will manage all the gtk modules to be loaded (engines, and so on). So XSettings would have the lists of modules instead of the envvar, and inform to the applications that this setting has changed. In this case is just load/unload the a11y modules as any other gtk modules. Anyway, there are some applications that made that in a custom way. The main example is firefox. As they have some custom a11y thingies, they override this procedure (ie loading by hand the atk bridge). So if firefox wants to use the XSettings solution he would require to rewrite that part, and from the gtk side, it should allow a process to be overriden. Firefox created a log of headaches in this aspect. More information and several cross-bugs here [1] Other issue is that the at-spi daemon (corba or dbus) must be running before the application load the modules (one part of this a11y initialization from the application side is register on at-spi). This can be tricky on the first application that want to instant-on the a11y, and it would require to check if the daemon is running, and if not, execute that. The other module part are general (just load gtk modules when required) but this step requires specific code. BR [1] http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-accessibility-list/2009-January/msg00030.html === API (apinhe...@igalia.com) _______________________________________________ gnome-accessibility-list mailing list gnome-accessibility-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/gnome-accessibility-list
