MSAA for Linux

[Rich Caloggero]

Well, not exactly MSAA, but something in the spirit of MSAA for linux would
be a *great* thing. MSAA allows a process to ask another process about its
internals. The questions which can be asked and the data which can be
gathered about process  X by process Y are carefully designed to minimize
security concerns and to be particularly useful to a screen reader. To put
it another way, if process X is a screen reader and process Y is, say, a web
browser, then process X is going to want to know a bunch of things about
process Y in order to allow a blind user to interact with it. Actually, if
process X could just get hold of the parsed html (this tree is usually
called the document object model - DOM), then the screen reader would be
able to do great things. If you look at the jfw scripts for internet
explorer, there is a call which returns a DOM object. The function called is
not defined anywhere in JFW; its a magic call  made posible by MSAA.
As fare as I know, the ultrasonix screen reader for X-Windows is based upon
similar technology. With X, however, implementing a protocol which can allow
any process to gather this kind of information from another process is
complex and risks exposing too much, making security a problem. There are
other issues too which I'm not really up on, but I do believe that X now has
RAP and ICE protocols (romote access protocol, and I'm not sure what ICE
stands for), but I'm not sure how fully developed they or ultrasonix are at
present.
Can anyone shed more light on this?

                    Rich




----- Original Message -----
From: "Victor Tsaran" <tsar at sylaba.poznan.pl>
To: <speakup at braille.uwo.ca>
Sent: Thursday, June 28, 2001 1:17 PM
Subject: Re: NICHOLAS PETRELEY: "The Open Source" from InfoWorld.com,
Wednesday, June 27, 2001


> I think this is a very interesting article. How do we, VIP, benefit from
the
> powerful and yet easy-to-use KDE version 2.1? Unfortunately, we can see it
> happening more often that more and more programs are written for X-Window.
> Don't tell me there are console alternatives for every GUI program, this
is
> no longer true. MSAA for Linux is what we need!
> Best,
> Vic
>
>
>
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