Java Access Bridge For Linux

Java Access Bridge is a module for GNOME, which connects the built-in accessibility support in Java Swing apps to the GNOME Accessibility framework, specifically the Assistive Technology Service Provider Interface (AT-SPI).

bridge: directory contains the Java Bridge component which is automatically loaded into each JVM invocation because of an entry in the accessibility.properties file in $JRE_HOME/lib.

($JRE_HOME is usually $JDK_HOME/jre).

idlgen: directory into which the auto-generated java wrappers for the org.gnome.Accessibility and org.gnome.Bonobo IDL are written by the Java IDL compiler, 'idlj'.

impl: directory where the implementation code for the Java Accessibility Bridge for GNOME resides. This code implements the Java Accessibility API AT-SPI interfaces on behalf of Java programs which implement the Java Accessibility API (JAAPI) internally; i.e. this implementation code wraps the JAAPI accessibility implementation and exports it via CORBA to the bonobo-based GNOME Accessibility Assistive Technology Service Provider Interface (AT-SPI)

(1) obtain the bridge via CVS checkout or unpacking a distribution tarfile. (2) If you obtained java-access-bridge from GNOME CVS:

run ./autogen.sh in the java-access-bridge directory (this directory), optionally specifying the "prefix" into which your GNOME 2 installation resides (e.g. /opt/gnome-2.0). Example:

./autogen.sh --prefix=/opt/gnome-2.0

You may optionally include a java_home environment variable:

./autogen.sh --prefix=/opt/gnome-2.0 --with-java-home=/usr/java/j2sdk1.4.0

(2a) If you obtained the java-access-bridge via a tarfile, run "./configure" in this directory with options as above.

(3) run make to build gnome-java-access.tar. You will need a Java Virtual Machine version 1.4.0 beta4 or higher.

(4) run make install.

(5) before running a Java program with the Java Access Bridge, you will need to make sure that your GNOME 2 installation enables CORBA traffic over IP from the ORBit2 ORB. Do this by including the following line in a file, ".orbitrc" in your home directory:

ORBIIOPIPv4=1

You also need to modify your Java runtime environment to include gnome-java-bridge.jar in $JRE_HOME/lib/ext and accessibility.properties in $JRE_HOME/lib. The best way to do this is to create symbolic links from ${prefix}/share/jar/gnome-java-bridge.jar to the "jre/lib/ext" directory and from ${prefix}/share/jar to the "jre/lib" directory, where $prefix is the directory you specified in autogen.sh; the default value is "/usr/local". A typical $JRE directory, if "which java" returned /usr/j2sdk1.4/bin/java, might be /usr/j2sdk1.4/jre.