Linux.conf.au 2004: Scripting with PyORBit

January 16, 2004

At Linux.conf.au 2004 in Adelaide, I gave a talk about controlling GNOME applications from Python via the accessibility framework.

At the time, GNOME’s accessibility framework (AT-SPI) was built on top of CORBA. I had been working on a Python binding for the ORBit2 CORBA implementation, so this talk demonstrated how it could be used to script the accessibility API.

Remote Control and Scripting of Gnome Applications with Python (slides)

Example Code

The slides reference a number of example programs provided here:

list-apps.py: lists all the accessible apps currently running.
dump-tree.py: dumps the accessible tree for a particular app.
follow-focus.py: prints information about the currently focused application.
spell-check.py: suggests corrections for mis-spellings found in text accessibles.
aspell.py: support module for spell-check.py.
open-nautilus.py: performs the “open” aciton on the first icon found.