[Kde-accessibility] Research Project Ideas Help

[Peter Korn]

Hi David,

As far as good projects to work on, please see the 'Accessibility "to-do" 
list' at:

   http://blogs.sun.com/roller/page/korn/20040722#guadec_04_trip_report


Regards,

Peter Korn
Sun Accessibility team


Olaf Jan Schmidt wrote:
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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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