[Kde-accessibility] Re: [kde-promo] Fwd: Free Standards GroupAccessibility Workgroup

[Gunnar Schmi Dt]

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Hello,

On Thursday 09 October 2003 20:08, Andreas Pour wrote:
> Gunnar Schmi Dt wrote:
>
> [ ... ]
>
> > So our current statement is
> >
> > <statement>
> > Despite the many ongoing efforts to help persons who cannot see or who
> > have trouble operating a standard keyboard or mouse use Linux systems,
> > Linux GUIs are still generally inaccessible to these users.
> >
> > We, people involved in the KDE project, do not want to support this
> > social exclusion but rather see the support for handicapped persons as an
> > important feature for every software. The KDE accessibility team knows
> > about the problem and they are working on improving the accessibility of
> > KDE.
>
> Just as a suggestion, how about "Members of the KDE Project, organized as
> the KDE accessibility team, view the capability to provide services to all
> potential users, regardless of individual physical cabilities, as an
> important feature for all software.  The KDE accessibility team understands
> the problems, studies impediments to the effective use of KDE and works
> actively to improve the accessibility of KDE."
>
> That way we lose the "handicapped" word again :-) and perhaps it deals with
> your concern below as well.  I think individual signatories is probably not
> needed in this case since I don't think any of this is controversial.
>
Well, I expect that other developers than only those in the KDE Accessibility 
Project see accessibility as an important feature, and I want this to be 
reflected in the statement. The reason for this is that we currently only 
have about 2 or 3 active developers in the KDE Accessibility Project, and 
that the statement gets lots more weight if e.g., ten other developers 
support the statement, too.

> > [...]
> Realistically speaking, just FMI, doesn't it make sense to place most of
> the assistive technologies in the Qt layer?  I ask b/c the statement speaks
> of "applications using other toolkits" whereas in fact KDE is not in
> control of its own toolkit and I am not sure that the KDE accessibility
> team can solve the problem w/out TT's assistance . . . .
>
It is possible to write assistive technologies without the help of Trolltech 
(as you see if you take a look on the applications in the kdeaccessibility 
cvs module and on features like color schemes and support for large fonts 
etc.). For the support of AT-SPI we do have the help of Trolltech.

Gunnar Schmi Dt
- -- 
Co-maintainer of the KDE Accessibility Project
Maintainer of the kdeaccessibility package
http://accessibility.kde.org/
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