Accessibility Toolkit

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ATK

Stable release	2.36.0 / April 2, 2020; 4 years ago (2020-04-02)[1]
Repository	gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/atk.git
License	GNU LGPL (version 2)[2]
Website	wiki.gnome.org/Accessibility

Accessibility Toolkit (ATK) is an open source software library, part of the GNOME project, which provides application programming interfaces (APIs) for implementing accessibility support in software.

One common nomenclature to explain an accessibility framework is a usual client-server architecture. In that way, assistive technologies (ATs) such as screen readers, would be the clients of that framework, and computer applications would be the server. In this architecture the client and server need to communicate with each other, usually using the IPC technology of the platform. Ideally the accessibility framework expose this to the client and server in a transparent way.

Usually the API for both client-side and server-side applications are the same, and the accessibility framework provides a client-side and a server-side implementation of that API. In the case of GNOME, there are two different APIs, one for the client-side (Assistive Technology Service Provider Interface (AT-SPI)) and a different one for the server-side (ATK) due to historical reasons related to the underlying technologies.^[3]