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

[Aaron Leventhal]

The Firefox 1.5 UI has to support MSAA perfectly to work with Windows 
AT's as the widgets are all windowless.  Because of work we did with AT 
vendors to support Firefox, MSAA is now a fine way to expose UI's to 
assistive tech. It's really in content where it falls short.
On the other hand, UI Automation could be the future but it's very far 
away in terms of support from AT vendors.

If you follow some guidelines for MSAA support you'll be fine. The MSDN 
docs will get you partially there, and I've attempted to document the 
rest of what's needed in Implementing an MSAA Server, A Practical Guide 
<http://www.mozilla.org/access/windows/msaa-server> and Accessible 
Toolkit Checklist <http://www.mozilla.org/access/toolkit-checklist>
It may also be interesting to read: Gecko Info for Windows Accessibility 
Vendors <http://www.mozilla.org/access/windows/at-apis>

Microsoft, Freedom Sci and GW Micro even use these docs as examples of 
how to deal with MSAA issues. You can look at it with MSAA tools to see 
how to expose each type of widget or read the docs from above.

- Aaron



Bill Haneman wrote:
> One thing to bear in mind is that MSAA's days seem quite numbered, as
> the last I heard was that it is scheduled for deprecation/replacement in 
> Longhorn, possibly in Office 12 as well but I have no details to hand 
> about that.  It's not clear that writing to MSAA is a good strategy even 
> for the medium-term.
>
> Bill
>
> Gary Cramblitt wrote:
>
>   
>> On Monday 14 November 2005 08:00 pm, Leo Spalteholz wrote:
>>  
>>
>>     
>>> Specifically for Qt, support is quite poor (although Openoffice is far
>>> worse).
>>>    
>>>
>>>       
>> Leo responded to me that this is Qt4.  That's very disappointing.  Leo please 
>> do report these to Trolltech and keep us informed.
>>
>> I can understand the menu problems you report had you said Qt3.  The QMenuBar 
>> and QPopupMenu widgets contained the individual menu items in a QMenuData 
>> structure that (I'm guessing) did not inherit the QAccessible interface.  In 
>> Qt4, the menus have been unified into a QMenu widget with QAction items.  I 
>> would have thought QAction would inherit the QAccessible interface and 
>> provide the accessible information.  Perhaps it is because QAction inherits 
>>     
> >from QObject, not QWidget that Inspect32 doesn't see the accessible info?  Or 
>   
>> perhaps Inspect32 doesn't know how to ask the QMenu widget for the individual 
>> menu items?
>>
>> The listview problems are probably similar issues.  Are you using the 
>> model/view architecture?
>>
>> I'm also a bit confused because I had understood there must be an accessible 
>> plugin installed that intermediates between Qt and Inspect32. ???
>>
>> My understanding is that oo.org does not support MSAA.  It does support the 
>> Java Accessibility API and AT-SPI, so it isn't surprising at all that 
>> Inspect32 would "fail miserably" on oo.org.
>>
>>  
>>
>>     
>
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>   

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