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

[Leo Spalteholz]

On 11/15/05, Gary Cramblitt <garycramblitt at comcast.net> wrote:
> On Tuesday 15 November 2005 06:52 pm, you wrote:
> > Will do.  I brought up the issue, and they confirmed that there were
> > some inconsistancies with MSAA support in menus, and promised to look
> > at the issue in Qt 4.1.  I will nail down some more concrete examples
> > of other problems and submit them to Trolltech.
>
> Thank you!
>
> > > I'm also a bit confused because I had understood there must be an
> > > accessible plugin installed that intermediates between Qt and Inspect32.
> > > ???
> >
> > I'm not entirely sure what you mean, but there is a compile-time
> > option for Qt to enable MSAA accessibility support.   It is on by
> > default, so I assume that Qt is loading that plugin.
>
> Well, I may be mixing apples with oranges.  To use AT-SPI with Qt, one has to
> install a suitable plugin, but maybe there is no plugin when using MSAA.  I
> dunno. :)
>
> > Ah.  Thank you for clearing this up.  This means I need to do some
> > research into the Java Accessibility API so that I can support
> > OpenOffice with my accessibility client.
>
> Watch for announcements coming out of meetings taking place in MA right now.
> It may be, for instance, that oo.org will decide to support MSAA.  Or someone
> will develop a bridge.  Keep an eye on Andy Updegrove's blog here:
>
> http://consortiuminfo.org/newsblog/
>
> Its hard to say where you should concentrate your efforts.  Is the Java
> Accessibility API well-accepted? How "open" a standard is it?  Will Sun
> change or drop it in the future?   I can tell you that GNOME, KDE, and Sun
> are definitely committed to AT-SPI.  Peter Korn hints that Microsoft will be
> dropping or radically changing MSAA, but he didn't give any links or
> specifics.  (I'm guessing that since Microsoft is migrating from ActiveX
> to .NET, that's the issue.)  If you find any useful information beyond specs
> and hype, I'd like to be better informed.

Me too :)  I am a newbie at all this stuff, but it certainly is
interesting.  Playing with Inspect32 is fascinating, it is amazing how
much information can be retrieved from the MSAA framework (and I
suspect any other accessibility framework) if it is properly
supported.  Names, default actions, screen positions, and the widget's
parents and children.  It even works for web pages (at least Firefox
does an excellent job of exposing the DOM of a page through MSAA).

That's why I was surprised to read Peter Korn's statement that
"Microsoft Active Accessibility (MSAA) - fails to provide most of the
information needed for screen reading and other AT uses, and is being
supplanted in future Windows releases."  I don't profess to know how
current screen readers are getting their info, but from my experience
it seems like MSAA is perfectly good at exposing the necessary
information.

For example, if MSAA is properly supported, I can grab all the menus
and menu items from an application without ever activating those
menus.  This allows me to present those menus in a way that is easier
to navigate with low-precision input devices.  Like so:
http://mushroomstamp.ca/menus.png

Cheers,
Leo