Accessibility Series

Wed May 9 21:16:13 UTC 2012

Yeah I had the same idea of moving the 2/3 paragraphs but then you end up
with a lot of contact us at the end. I figured that paragraph 3 probably
isn't bad at the start but I'll request a clear paragraph on accessibilty.
It can probably be a link out to an explanation of the concept and then
what they are trying as group to achieve in KDE.

On Wed, May 9, 2012 at 3:08 PM, Marta Rybczynska <marta at rybczynska.net>wrote:

> Hello Roger,
> Thanks for the work on the text. What do you think about moving paragraph
> 2 &
> 3 at the end? And maybe adding a paragraph that describes what is *exactly*
> the acessibility project for.
>
> Thanks,
> Marta
>
> Roger Pixley wrote:
> > Hello all,
> >
> > Sorry for being so silent so long but I've not had net and have been
> > country jumping (again). To get back in the saddle I've been speaking
> with
> > the KDE accessibilty team and they have a lot of work going on. So we are
> > working on a mini series of articles with the last set being on Simon
> since
> > that project has had a lot of exposure recently. The main dev was
> gracious
> > enough to let everyone else on the A11y team get a chance to speak.
> Fredrik
> > will probably be doing most of the writeups so that it can be managed
> > unless one of the other devs really wants to do their own writeup.
> >
> > I'll put the first in the series here with two edits of my own. One for
> > grammar and the other with a link to clarify the focus follows mind quip
> :)
> > The only change that I would suggest is to put the contact the mailing
> list
> > paragraph further to the bottom but that may just be my personality being
> > imposed on the writing. Any comments? I'd like to have it cleared for the
> > digest by tomorrow.
> > As an aside if anyone reads through this and then on the readmore links
> at
> > the end expected to see information which is missing let me know so we
> can
> > get that up on the wiki pages.
> >
> >
> > Hello dear KDE Commit Digest reader,
> > I was asked to talk a bit about what's happening when it comes to KDE and
> > accessibility at the moment, something I'm happy to do.
> > For me KDE is about inclusiveness and enabling people to use technology.
> > Don't
> > think this doesn't affect you, it's a broad subject and everyone benefits
> > in some way.
> >
> > And hey, this is the commit digest, I bet you're itching to get your
> hands
> > onto some code, right? Join us and dive into a fun community effort,
> what's
> > stopping you?
> > We have a growing and ever more active team now, meeting in
> > #kde-accessibility
> > on irc (freenode). The mailing list is of course another good point of
> > contact: https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/kde-accessibility
> >
> > For developers to get started, I wrote a few points that you can check in
> > order to make your application usable by as many people as possible.
> > http://techbase.kde.org/Development/Tutorials/Accessibility/Checklist
> >
> > Since this is the first post about accessibility here, I'd like to
> mention
> > what's currently going on.
> > There are several areas where we're improving, one great newcomer is of
> > course Simon, an application that lets you control your computer via
> > speech. I'll for now refer you to the Simon blog
> > http://simon-listens.blogspot.com/ for the latest news.
> > The other big thing going on is that qt-at-spi has seen many
> improvements.
> > Now
> > I don't expect everyone to know what qt-at-spi is... and that's the way
> it
> > should be. Qt-at-spi is a plugin for Qt, that exposes information about
> > what is on screen via the AT-SPI api that the Gnome accessibility tools
> > use. After some research and help from the great Gnome accessibility
> team,
> > I spent
> > some time during the last year to get this plugin into shape. It exposes
> > semantics about applications so that Assistive Technologies (ATs) use the
> > information to support the user.
> > One classical example is a screen reader. Screen readers are programs
> that
> > "read" the user interface so that people that are blind can use
> > applications.
> > Orca from Gnome now works to some degree with KDE applications thanks to
> > the plugin. Now we reached a phase where more and more feedback from
> users
> > benefitting from this comes in and we can start polishing the experience.
> > As you can imagine, the mouse is not all that helpful when you cannot see
> > where the pointer is, therefor having a working keyboard interface to our
> > applications is important.
> >
> > Let's just imagine a dialog with an OK and Cancel button. With the
> > accessibility tools, the screen reader "knows" that there is a button
> with
> > label "OK" at this position. It can check the state and find out that
> it's
> > currently focused. When you press the tab key, the focus moves over to
> the
> > "Cancel" button. Now the screen reader gets a notification on focus
> changes
> > and will read "Cancel - Button" for example.
> > If you want to see how that is done, you can of course read the Qt
> sources
> > and
> > the qt-at-spi plugin sources. There's lots to do, for an easy starter,
> > adding
> > more unit tests would be a good idea.
> > Get the code here: http://projects.kde.org/qtatspi there are still many
> low
> > hanging fruits as well as tricky issues to be tackled.
> >
> > But that's not all that's happening in accessibility land currently: we
> > have summer of code projects for Simon and one to improve KMag.
> > Let me talk about KMag in this context. When using a magnifier, it's
> still
> > important to know where the focus is. Since we don't have focus
> > follows mind<http://blogs.kde.org/node/1860>
> > yet, we need to figure out where the focus is at. Guess what - we're
> using
> > AT-
> > SPI to do that.
> > Amandeep Singh is working with Sebastian Sauer to make the pieces fit
> > together. In order to let not only KMag benefit from the work, the
> changes
> > are
> > actually done in a client side AT-SPI library for Qt/KDE applications.
> > You can follow the progress here:
> > http://projects.kde.org/libkdeaccessibilityclient and in KMag of course.
> >
> > Now if you're as excited about this all and want to read more (you know
> you
> > do!), here are some more helpful links:
> > http://userbase.kde.org/Accessibility
> > http://techbase.kde.org/Development/Tutorials/Accessibility
> >
> > Cheers
> > Frederik
> _______________________________________________
> Digest mailing list
> Digest at kde.org
> https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/digest
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mail.kde.org/pipermail/digest/attachments/20120509/ff73955a/attachment.html>