[Kde-accessibility] Research Project Ideas Help

[Olaf Jan Schmidt]

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Hi David!

[David Weinkauf, Dienstag, 12. Oktober 2004 22:47]
> I am applying for a DAAD scholarship to do some research at a German
> University.

Where do you plan to go in Germany? Both Gunnar and I are students in 
Germany (Bonn and Paderborn).

> I am currently involved in accessibility at the University
> of Toronto and would like to concentrate my DAAD research in KDE
> Accessibility.

Toronto seems to be very active in accessibility. Do you know the people 
who did the research that led to the development of the GNOME On-Screen 
keyboard?

> I am a programmer and have wanted, for some time now, to
> involve myself in KDE Accessibility, but have never found the time.
> Hopefully, this DAAD scholarship will provide me with this opportunity.
> I'm wondering if you could inform me as to what areas of KDE
> Accessibility require work / research in hopes that I may potentially
> use this as a basis for my proposal. Any thoughts and / or suggestions
> are very much appreciated.
>

Harald is currently extending the Qt Accessibility Framework and writing 
bridges to ensure that KDE fully interoperates with the GNOME assistive 
technologies. Interoperability is the main focus of our work.

One area where research needs to be done is low vision. We have a number 
of settings in KDE, and we have a magnification application KMag, but 
when I did some user testing I found that this is not enough. Gnopernicus 
offers full-screen magnification using gnome-mag, which is an important 
feature, but there is still far more work needed to have a really good 
solution. One problem is that magnification of a screenshot will always 
lead to rough edges, rather than simply rendering all the screen content 
with a different size. One way to fix this would be to add magnification 
functionality to a vector-graphics-enabled X-Server (Cairo project), and 
to write a KDE frontend for it.

Another are which needs work is speech recognition. The Sphinx-project is 
writing a Java-based speech recognition system, which could be integrated 
into the desktop using Harald's DBUS-protocol for assisitive 
technologies.

For blind people, there has been some research that went into the two 
GNOME-based screen readers Gnopernicus and Orca, which will both 
interoperate with KDE 4 using Harald's Qt-ATK bridge. Writing yet another 
screen reader might be a loack of resources, unless the concept is 
sufficiently different to fulfill a different need. But my expericence 
talking with blind people is that the two screen readers still need to be 
much improved to be reliable enough for production use.

Some research was also done for motion some impairments that led to the 
development of Dasher and GOK, but more research for other groups of 
motion impairments could of course lead to a third assistive technology 
for motion impaired users, which could of course be KDE-based.

If you choose to write a new assistive technology, then you can make it 
work with both KDE/Qt and GTK/GNOME applications via Harald's 
CSPI/DBUS-bridge.

If you have any more questions, feel free to ask.

Olaf

- -- 
Olaf Jan Schmidt, KDE Accessibility Project
KDEAP co-maintainer, maintainer of http://accessibility.kde.org

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