[Kde-accessibility] Research Project Ideas Help

[David Weinkauf]

Hi Olaf:

Olaf Jan Schmidt wrote:
> Hi David!
> 
> Where do you plan to go in Germany? Both Gunnar and I are students in 
> Germany (Bonn and Paderborn).
> 

I will be hopefully sorting this out this week, but if you know of any 
professors who are interested in accessibility (Bonn is a very nice city 
btw :)), please, let me know. I can contact them and possibly reference 
them in the application.

> 
> 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 do indeed. I work at the ATRC as well.

> 
> 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.
> 

Excellent, excellent. Thank you very much. These are great leads. Wish 
me luck!

David

> Olaf
>