[Kde-accessibility] Re: accessibility problem for visual impairment

[Sebastian Sauer]

Mackenzie Morgan wrote:
> 李庭旭 <edwintinghsulee <at> gmail.com> writes:
> 
>> 
>> dear KDE accessibility teams:      I am the KDE-user with visual
> impairment.however you have the function for magnification words, but
> screen reader is important to visual impairment people especially blind
> people. I hope your team will develop the screen reader for visual
> impairment people in the next KDE desktop.
> 
> Unfortunately, most widgets don't have any support for at-spi at the
> moment. There's some experimental support for some widgets from
> qt4-at-spi, but it's far
> from complete.  This means that even if you used an existing screenreader
> (such
> as Orca, from GNOME), there's little it'd be able to "see" to read to you.
>  It's a big thing to tackle, and it's not just at the application level,
> but all the way down to the Qt toolkit which KDE is built on top of.
 
Actually all Qt and KDE widgets are fully accessible already. For that Qt uses 
the cross-platform QAccessibility-framework. Custom widgets like those drawn 
using QPainter are not accessible (e.g. kate implements kateviewaccessible.h 
to make it's canvas accessible - I would have added a link to the file but 
seems all the KDE-restructure resulted in me not being able to find kdebase 
any longer, grrrr).

KDE 4.6 ships with kaccessible (located in the kdeaccessibility-module) which 
has a screenreader included. Please give it a try and let us know what needs 
to be improved.

Best regards
Sebastian