[Kde-accessibility] Fwd: KDE Accessibility

[Olaf Jan Schmidt]

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Hello Volker!

Thank you very much for your quick reply.

> One of the issues mentioned that the Qt API for accessibility support
> was not versatile enough to be used by KDE, and that the implementation
> we have would need to be extended (and implemented on UNIX).=20

That was our impression, we might be wrong.

Everything we were saying was based on our unclear understanding of the=20
online documentation.

> - Qt receives the WM_GETOBJECT message
> Qt uses the static function QAccessible::queryAccessibleInterface(
> QObject*, QAccessibleInterface ** ) to get hold of the accessibility
> implementation for the widget that the WM_GETOBJECT message had been
> sent to.

How does this static function know about KDE subclasses of Qt Objects? Is=
=20
there a way to extend this functionality for all KObjects as well?

> - Additionally to that, Active Accessibility provides a notification
> mechanism that allows applications to tell accessibility clients that
> something important has changed or happend (e.g. a checkbox changed
> it's state). The static QAccessible::updateAccessibility() is provided
> for that, and a large set of "event types" (e.g. ValueChanged) is
> defined in an enum (the enum values are identical to the respective
> values in Windows, but can easily be mapped to something else).

That's good. I couldn't figure out how this works from the QAccessible=20
class documentation.

We would also need information about simple things like a moved cursor.

> If it is not sufficient it is trivial to add another interface and
> implement that as well in the plugins

Great! To be honest, we are not sure ourselves what would be needed. The=20
standard accessibility solution on Linux is coming from Gnome, so we have=
=20
to learn both Qt and Gnome stuff to figure out the best way how we can=20
use existing code best.

> Any RPC will do for that, and we would definitely be interested in
> putting some efforts into this (e.g. implement the server side for the
> RPC in Qt). Naturally, we would prefer this to be independent of e.g.
> CORBA ;-)

That's our interest as well. We don't use CORBA in KDE. :-)

> Well, please fwd. this to the respective lists/people. I would of
> course like to know more details about what parts seem to be
> insufficient or not flexible enough, so that we can add some fu in Qt.

We are still very much in a discussion phase and learning what Sun and th=
e=20
Gnome Accessibility Project exaclty did with their AT-SPI. It would be of=
=20
great help if you could join the kde-accessibility mailing list=20
(http://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/kde-accessibility).

> At least the implementations we provide for all the Qt widgets should
> be reusable.

My biggest question was how that is extendable to KDE subclasses and how=20
to get information on a cursor movements etc.

> PS: And somebody should do something about the HTML of your webpage -
> it's somehow misformatted with IE and Mozialla ;-)

I'm currently looking into that. The autogenerated html form a dokbook=20
does not find its style sheets... :-(

Olaf.

- --=20
Olaf Jan Schmidt, KDE Accessibility team

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