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

[Gary Cramblitt]

On Monday 14 November 2005 08:00 pm, Leo Spalteholz wrote:
> On windows there is an application called Inspect32
> (http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=3755582A-A707-460
>A-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.

You didn't say whether this is Qt3 or Qt4.

> 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.

KDE4 is still rather unstable and in flux, so no hurry.  I was trying to port 
kttsd, but gave up for now.  I'll come back to it in a month or two. :)

-- 
Gary Cramblitt (aka PhantomsDad)
KDE Text-to-Speech Maintainer
http://accessibility.kde.org/developer/kttsd/index.php