[Kde-accessibility] KOffice 1.4.1 Accessibility Assessment

[Bill Haneman]

HI Gary:

Those URIs are not working for me.  Could you check and repost?  Thanks.

Bill

Gary Cramblitt wrote:

>I have completed an accessibility self-assessment for KOffice version 1.4.1.  
>You may view the assessment by downloading one of the following files:
>
>http://accessibility.kde.org/reports/koffice-1.4.1-assessment.sxw  (oo.org v1)
>http://accessibility.kde.org/reports/koffice-1.4.1-assessment.odt   (ODF)
>http://accessibility.kde.org/reports/koffice-1.4.1-assessment.pdf  (PDF)
>
>The assessment has been coordinated with the KOffice development team and 
>includes notes about fixes in the upcoming 1.5 release (early 2006).
>
>Comments, corrections, etc. welcome.  In a couple of days, barring major 
>changes or objections, I intend to publish it on the KDE Accessibility 
>website at
>
>http://accessibility.kde.org/reports/
>
>The reasons for the assessment are:
>
>  1.  The Massachusetts Commission for the Blind requested accessibility 
>information concerning software that supports the Open Document Format (ODF), 
>i.e., KOffice.  (See 
>http://lists.kde.org/?l=kde-accessibility&m=112653249424930&w=2)
>
>  2.  It needed to be done.
>
>I expected blind access to be poor, since KDE does not have a screen reader, 
>but the results for low-sighted and motor impaired users were surprisingly 
>disappointing.  That's the bad news.  The good news is that the KOffice devs 
>have been very supportive and many (but not all) of the problems will be 
>fixed in 1.5.
>
>I've reached the following conclusions:
>
>  1.  Some of the problems are fundamental to Qt3 and kdelibs3.  QSplitter, 
>QDockWindow, and QToolbar, for instance, are 3 problem areas.
>
>  2.  We need to get to Qt4/kdelibs4 as soon as possible.  But there will 
>still be many issues to address.  Accessibility won't happen automagically.
>
>  3.  We need to do this sort of thing more often and hold developers feet to 
>the fire.  Many of these problems are easy to fix if caught early.  Others 
>are not so easy and will need changes to core functionality to fix properly.  
>Some are basic design flaws, such as providing functions that can only be 
>performed using a mouse.
>
>  4.  The timing of this assessment is really bad because KDE 3.5 is in freeze 
>and KDE4 is a long way off.  Had this assessment been done 6 or 9 months ago, 
>we probably could have solved most of the problems (except for blind access) 
>by making needed changes to kdelibs3.
>
>If anyone wants to do similar assessments for other KDE applications, please 
>do so and send them to me.  They are not hard to do, and you don't have to be 
>a programmer to do them.
>
>Regards
>  
>