[Kde-accessibility] Question: How can I improve my app (kdeedu/kalzium)

[Olaf Schmidt]

Hi Carsten!

Thanks for your mail and sorry for the delay in responding.

Bill and Peter have already mentioned the most points, but I decided to 
also look at kalzium to see whether I can find any more ideas.

One very important area is of course keyboard navigation. I like your 
minicli idea. You might also think about arrow navigation in the table. 
Defining shortcuts and accelerators for all menu elements also helps. 
Alllowing the users to enter a number whereever a slider is used would 
also make keyboard use easier, and adding an label for the sliders with 
an accelerator.

You might also wish to improve the "Keine unterschiedlichen Farben" mode 
to only use the text and base (text background) colours from the current 
colour schemes. This is important for partially sighted people who need 
to use white text an a black background, for example. The mode should 
support to show all information without the use of additional colours 
(apart from other standard colours such as highlight background and 
foreground colours). This means you would have to show the aggregate 
state as text in this case.

For KDE 4.0, it would also be good to provide a QAccessible object for the 
element widgets. This will make it possible for blind users to use 
kalzium with a braille device or a screen reader. More information on 
this will be available once Qt 4.0 has been released.

Olaf

-- 
KDE Accessibility Project