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Cally: Clutter Accessibility Implementation Library

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Author(s): 
Alejandro Piñeiro Iglesias (API)

Clutter is an open source software library for creating fast, visually rich and animated graphical user interfaces. Clutter uses OpenGL (and optionally OpenGL ES for use on Mobile and embedded platforms).

Clutter aims to be non specific -- it implements no particular style, but rather provides a rich generic foundation that facilitates rapid and easy creation of higher level tool kits tailored to specific needs. 

Clutter has had a lot of repercusion on the GNOME comunity, and several projects and applications started to use that (Mutter, Candies, etc.) 

But, at that moment, Clutter has not implemented any accessibility support. 

In GNOME, accessibility is a core value that touches all aspects of the system. [1] 

From the infrastructure, to the graphical toolkit, to the applications, to the assistive technologies, accessibility has been a central consideration from the very early days. As a result, GNOME not only has compelling accessibility today, but it also provides a rich and stable base for future accessibility work. 

ATK [1] provides the set of accessibility interfaces that are implemented by other toolkits and applications. Using the ATK interfaces, accessibility tools have full access to view and control running applications. 

At that moment, the more complete and used implementation of ATK is GAIL [2] (GNOME Accessibility Implementation Library), that basically implements the accessibility support for the GTK+ toolkit. 

The Clutter community has expresed his interest in adding accessibility support to the Clutter library, but the work was not started yet inside the project. 

Here we present cally, a Clutter Accessibility Implementation Library. Basically, it is the implementation of the ATK interfaces for the main Clutter objects, following the example of GAIL with GTK+, implementing it as first as a isolated module. It is not complete, but it is working, and allows to view and interact with the different Clutter objects. 

Once we have a first implementation working, several questions could arise regarding some of the implementation decisions, the abstraction level in which the accessibility is being implemented, or if it should be maintained isolated or become part of Clutter itself. 

The purpose of this presentation is explaining the work done so far in the accessibility support for Clutter, and opening a discussion about those topics in order to get feedback from the community to focus the future development of the library. 

[1] http://library.gnome.org/devel/accessibility-devel-guide/nightly/gad-how...
[2] http://library.gnome.org/devel/atk/stable/
[3] http://library.gnome.org/devel/gail-libgail-util/stable/

Author bio: 
Affiliation: Igalia Alejandro, who holds a degree in Computer Engineering from the University of A Coruña, has been working at Igalia since 2006. He is involved in the development of projects using GTK+/GNOME technologies and, in particular, Maemo and HAIL (the accessibility implementation library for the Hildon widgets). He also participates in the GNOME Build Brigade.