Add a way to notify about object attribute changes
The AT-SPI2 Accessible
interface has a Accessible::GetAttributes
method to query object attributes. For performance reasons, assistive technology may want to cache those object attributes instead of querying them each time they're needed, as e.g. Orca now does more widely (s. orca@13d06977 ).
However, object attributes may change, so a way/event to notify about object attribute changes is needed to allow caching while reliably preventing the use of outdated data. Similar events already exist for other property changes, e.g. object:property-change:accessible-name
when the accessible name changes.
The Event XML specification mentions some AttributesChanged
event type, but from a first glance, it seems that this is not actually used/implemented in practice.
Related Orca issue: orca#423 (closed)
Side notes:
-
Depending on the outcome of gtk#6196, Gtk 4 applications might have to proactively handle object attribute changes by calling
gtk_accessible_update_property
anyway, so extending Gtk to send a corresponding event on the AT-SPI layer should be straightforward in that case. -
Qt already has a
QAccessible::ObjectAttributeChanged
event type, but that's currently unused and ignored in its AT-SPI adapter.