[Libreoffice] IAccessible2 - Windows (from libreoffice-accessibility)

[Christophe Strobbe]

Hi Michael,

At 16:41 27-9-2011, Michael Meeks wrote:
>Hi Christophe,
>
>         Thanks for forwarding this.
>
>On Tue, 2011-09-27 at 10:50 +0200, Christophe Strobbe wrote:
> > It appears that the code is still only available in CWSes:
> > <http://hg.services.openoffice.org/>. Malte Timmermann's message
> > describes in what order the code from the CWSes was meant to be
> > integrated.
>
>         It is very useful for archiving & understanding on the off 
> chance that
>IBM don't meet their commitment to do the right thing and get this into
>Apache in a form that we can easily consume.
>
>         The real question is - should we spend time continuing the 
> (nice) work
>that Malte started, when we know that IBM have this done & working
>in-house, and have committed to release it at some stage.

I apologise in advance if I sound repetitive...

My understanding was that IBM donated IAccessible2 code based on an 
OpenOffice.org version that was outdated by the time of their 
donation, and that Malte Timmermann was working on integrating the 
code when Oracle decided to give OOo to the community.
As far as I know, what IBM has done & working in-house and promised 
to release is Lotus Symphony code, i.e. with an SWT-based UI. SWT 
does not expose accessibility info through the Java Accessibility API 
but through the accessibility API of the target desktop operating 
system (at least Eclipse does that [1]).
(Continued below...)



>         AFAICS that is still not a great use of developer time, though we can
>help support a volunteer that wants to that I guess. It has the
>potential to make merging IBM's re-worked version of what they publicly
>released before even more painful though -> so in fact this could
>potentially waste developer time twice. Ideally we'd have a commitment
>from whomever did the merging that they would then help unwind the
>consequences / merge the delta to IBM's work later.
>
>         IMHO the best outcome is still for IBM to live up to their public
>commitments and release the IAcc2 integration code, and for us to merge
>it as/when that is done. As/when/until they do them - I suspect this
>space will stay as sterile - for which IBM bear a large responsibility.

If IBM plans to release Lotus Symphony code that already supports 
IAccessible2, I have very little hope that they will first integrate 
the CWSes with IAccessible2 code into the current "trunk" of 
OpenOffice.org (see also Fridrich Strba's message). So I think that 
waiting for IAccessible2 will come down to waiting for the Lotus 
Symphony donation. LibreOffice would then have the choice between 
using the CWSes or integrating the UI from Lotus Symphony.



>         Then again - it is a really nice feature that would be great to have,
>not least due to it dropping a Java dependency.
>
>         Anyhow, that's my take, sorry if that's not the answer you want.



[1] See 
<http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/rational/library/dec05/pilgrim/> 
and 
<http://www.eclipse.org/articles/article.php?file=Article-Accessibility351/index.html>. 


Best regards,

Christophe



>         HTH,
>
>                 Michael.
>
>--
>michael.meeks at suse.com  <><, Pseudo Engineer, itinerant idiot


-- 
Christophe Strobbe
K.U.Leuven - Dept. of Electrical Engineering - SCD
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