[Kde-accessibility] Research Project Ideas Help
David Weinkauf
d.weinkauf at utoronto.ca
Sat Oct 16 18:15:03 CEST 2004
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
>
More information about the kde-accessibility
mailing list