[Kde-accessibility] Timeframe for KDE 4

[Bill Haneman]

On Tue, 2006-02-21 at 10:36, Olaf Jan Schmidt wrote:
> [ Gary Cramblitt ]
> > I believe there is ALOT more to this.  The AT-SPI currently requires CORBA
> > libraries.  There is a desire to switch it to DBUS. To do this properly, 
> > we need an IDL to DBUS compiler.  AFAIK, nobody has begun work on that. 
> 
> Harald said someone is working on it (I don't remember who), but I agree that 
> this needs to be added to our list of requirements for KDE4.
> 
> There are two parts to AT-SPI support in KDE. One of the parts (making KDE 
> applications accessible to assistive technologies) would be possible without 
> a move to DBUS. The other part (making the KDE assistive technologies support 
> AT-SPI) needs DBUS.

I don't understand why this is, as the proposal I though we agreed to in
the short term bridges Qt/KDE to AT-SPI (via the atk-bridge, if I recall
correctly).

The DBUS work is only needed to (eventually) remove the need for
accessible KDE apps to dynamically link to the ORBit2 libs (via the
atk-bridge).

A DBUS-based approach, if implemented in KDE at this time, would NOT
work with the existing AT-SPI-based assistive technologies, as they need
native AT-SPI support.  While I think we agree that an alternative to
the CORBA IPC is an attractive long-term goal, to make it easier for the
desktops to share assistive technologies, I don't see how it can work in
the "initial" KDE4 timeframe.

Best regards,

Bill

> > Some of the focus problems mentioned there might actually be problems with
> > themes.  The KDE default Plastik theme highlights by painting a blue
> > background that obscures the focus rectangle.  Change to a different theme,
> > or change the color, and you can see the focus rectangle.
> 
> Thanks for the observation. I nevertheless think that the code for the focus 
> rectangle should be updated to work with more colour schemes. My current idea 
> is to add focus colours to the colour schemes (for focus rectangles and 
> mouse-over effects).
> 
> >   1.  Toolbars cannot be navigated without a mouse.
> 
> The position of Gnome and Windows is that toolbars do not need keyboard 
> support if the functionality is also available elsewhere, but MacOS indeed 
> has a keyboard navigation mode for toolbars.
> 
> >   2.  QSplitter and QDockWindow, and the widgets derived from them cannot
> > be sized, undocked, or docked without a mouse.  See
> > trunk/koffice/lib/kofficecore/kkbdaccessextensions.h/cpp for the KOffice
> > 1.5 kludge I implemented.
> 
> Yes, we generally need to work on keyboard navigation in KDE4.
> 
> >   3.  Too many apps capture TAB and Shift-TAB unnecessarily, and even if
> > they must capture them (such as the KWord main document window), do not
> > provide alternative ways to move focus out of the widget without a mouse.
> 
> Gnome offers Ctrl+TAB as an alternative keyboard shortcut for moving the 
> focus. Qt does the same if an XDG setting is set appropriately, but 
> unfortunately this clashes with the default KDE keyboard scheme.
> 
> >   4.  Not all widgets honor the high contrast and big themes.  For example,
> > in KOffice, the font dropdown widget, in an effort to render the font names
> > in each font, forgets to size the text according to the theme, and
> > therefore does not display the list in large text when a big theme is in
> > effect.
> 
> This is exactly what we wish to solve with the new guidelines on colour 
> schemes.
> 
> Can your mail provider handle a big mails (about 1 MB)? Then I would like to 
> send you the draft for review.
> 
> > I don't think we have enough manpower in the kde accessibility team to fix
> > all the problems.  We need a commitment from the core developers and from
> > the kde community to fix problems and not implement new ones.  The lesson I
> > learned from my attempts to improve accessibility for KOffice is that the
> > "bolt on" approach works badly or not at all.  The kde accessibility team
> > will have its hands full just identifying the issues.
> 
> I fully agree.
> 
> Olaf
> 
> -- 
> Olaf Jan Schmidt, KDE Accessibility co-maintainer, open standards 
> accessibility networker, Protestant theology student and webmaster of 
> http://accessibility.kde.org/ and http://www.amen-online.de/
> _______________________________________________
> kde-accessibility mailing list
> kde-accessibility at kde.org
> https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/kde-accessibility