gail currently only exports a very small number of interfaces, in libgail-util.  These interfaces are provided specifically so that custom widgets can more easily and consistently implement the ATK interfaces.

In general we don't want to export the other gail headers, since the implementation details of how ATK is provided for specific widgets is not something we want to require bincompat for, nor do we want these interfaces, in general, to be used externally (other than the ones in libgail-gnome).

However, virtually every custom widget ATK implementation in every app or toolkit that implements custom widgets, would like to inherit from GailWidget.  GailWidget 's type and class structs are actually very simple, so it would not be harmful to expose them; this would simplify the task of writing custom widgets somewhat, and eliminate the need to do hackish "anonymous inheritance" tricks as suggested in this paper: http://developer.gnome.org/projects/gap/presentations/GUAD3C/making-apps-accessible/anonymous-inheritance-1.html

I attach a patch which exports gailwidget.h.