[Kde-accessibility] An accessible Qt? I think not.

[Leo Spalteholz]

I've been working with Qt a lot at work and to be honest, am losing
some faith in it as a viable framework for me to use.  Don't get me
wrong, Qt is just beautiful to program with, and I love it to death,
but the support for accessibility frameworks is very very poor.  It
seems like it was just implemented enough to check off a box on a
brochure, but not enough to be actually useful.
We develop applications for disabled people, and since I am working on
an accessibility client for Windows, I depend heavily on applications
having implemented support for MSAA properly.  I'm sad to say that
this is not the case for Qt applications.

On windows there is an application called Inspect32
(http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=3755582A-A707-460A-BF21-1373316E13F0&displaylang=en)
that is used to display the Accessibility interface for any GUI widget
(by pointing at it with the mouse or shifting focus to it).  It is a
fantastic way to explore the accessibility support of an application. 
If any of you have access to a windows install, play with it a bit. 
You'll see that the support for MSAA varies with different
applications.

Specifically for Qt, support is quite poor (although Openoffice is far worse).

Mouse over a menu (Like "File") in a Qt application and Inspect won't
tell you anything about it whereas it should return the name.  Menu
items sometimes work, but sometimes return the wrong item.  Already
every single Qt application is innaccessible to all those relying on
screen readers.  I pointed this out to the trolls and they promised to
fix it for the next version, which is a positive sign at least.
This isn't the only problem though.  Really, I can't see how they can
claim to support MSAA when 90% of the functionality isn't available. 
The text in buttons is not available, items in list views return
nothing, the menu structure is not accessible through the tree, really
it is rare that something actually works.

Trolltech has claimed to support accessibility on windows since
version 3 (I think) so I expected it to work, but it clearly doesn't. 
I don't hold out much hope for the state of support for AT-SPI, which
is even newer.

Compare something built with wxWidgets or the Firefox toolkit, where
everything works as expected, better than native windows applications
in fact.

Gary, I read your recent blog post with great interest, where you
downplayed the fears of the disabled community in Mass. about
switching to openoffice.  Perhaps I'm doing something wrong, but using
Inspect32, which returns correct data on every application which
supports MSAA that I've tried, OpenOffice fails miserably.  Perhaps
their fears are actually very real, and not based on misinformation.

Something to think about...

Leo

PS.  About Nokey, it hasn't been forgotten, although it certainly
looks that way given the lack of activity.  I hit some snags porting
to Qt4, and I've been very busy at work creating similar applications.
 Hopefully I'll have some time for it soon.