[Kde-accessibility] Speaking KMail

[Gary Cramblitt]

On Thursday 01 September 2005 04:58 pm, Mario Fux wrote:
> Good morning
>
> Mostly, I just lurking on this mailinglist. I'm quite interested in this
> topic and saw one of your presentation at Linuxtag2005.
>
> Anyway. In the last days I thought about "speaking" KDE and what visually
> impaired people need most on a desktop and after Konqueror has some speech
> output the next logical step (perhaps after kpdf, but...) would be KMail
> with speech output.
>
> Are you about this or are you waiting for KDE 4 where the accessibility
> infrastructure in KDE should be ubiquitious?

Accessibility work on KDE 3.5 is mostly finished.  We are now doing the 
planning for KDE4.  With the Qt4 accessibility interface automatically 
incorporated into every KDE widget plus the AT-SPI integration that Harald 
Fernengel is working on, we finally have a robust framework in which we can 
accessibility-enable KDE applications.  KMail would certainly be a good 
application to concentrate on.

We are currently thinking about ways to do this in a flexible and efficient 
manner.  One thought, for example, is to add onto the accessibility 
information already provided by Qt by adding modules that understand document 
content.  For example, to provide robust navigation within a mail document, 
one needs to know where the paragraphs are, which ones are quoted, what 
attachments are included, etc.

If you are interested in helping with this effort, that would be welcome.  
Even if you are not a programmer, you can help with testing, concept 
development, and documentation.  If you haven't already looked at it, I 
recommend http://accessibility.kde.org as a starting point.

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