[Kde-accessibility] Timeframe for KDE 4

[Gunnar Schmi Dt]

Hello,

There were quite a number of responses on the accessibility list and no 
responses on the kde-hci list. (I suppose that is OK since the most 
advanced HCI efforts are accessibility-related.)

On Monday 20 February 2006 23:38, Gary Cramblitt wrote:
> On Monday 20 February 2006 13:28, Gunnar Schmi Dt wrote:
> > [...]
> > 1. Integrate support for screen readers and other assistive
> > technologies into KDE (via QAccessible and Qt-SPI)
> > [...]
>
> 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.  See this thread:
>
> http://lists.kde.org/?l=kde-accessibility&m=113469521917985&w=2

For the purposes of the TWG we can summarise the AT-SPI-related discussion 
as follows:

The AT-SPI integration needs to be done in two distinct efforts:

a) In order to enable AT-SPI-based assistive technologies to work together 
with KDE applications we can make use of the QAccessible framework. 
Basically this involves implementing accessibility-related information for 
all KDE widgets.

This effort can be done without changing the API, but it needs to be 
completed before we release KDE 4. (Otherwise we would disappoint the 
people who expect KDE 4 to be as accessible as GNOME -- as we have told 
since about two years.)

b) Enabling our assistive technologies to make use of AT-SPI is more an 
open problem. AT-SPI is currently based on CORBA. As a long-term goal it 
is planned to move AT-SPI to DBUS, but this requires to write an IDL 
compiler for DBUS first.

> > 2. Updated guidelines and widgets for colors, fonts and icons
> > [...]
> > 3. Implement the usability enhancements shown on
> > http://test.openusability.org/wiki_ou/index.php/Libs
>
> Some of the focus problems mentioned there might actually be problems
> with themes.
> [...] 
>
> What is needed is some effort to determine if these (and other a11y)
> problems exist in Qt4/kdelibs4 and solve them. [...] This is really two
> tasks: 1.  Identify the issues, and 2.  Fix them.  Identifying the
> issues has been on my TODO list for awhile, but kdelibs4 has not been
> far enough along or stable enough to do it.
>
> [...]
>
> > Open questions are:
> > - How much time do we need for implementing the above efforts?
> > - Who will implement the kdelibs changes for 2.? It can be done by the
> > people involved in the kdeaccessibility project, but that will delay
> > other important accessibility work.
>
> 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.

You are right. We need to make sure that accessibility gets as widely 
considered by application developers as currently e.g. 
internationalization. I am not sure how to achieve this, though. Two 
possible ways would be to take the problem to the board meeting and to 
write a "call for help" mails to the kde-core-devel list.

Gunnar Schmi Dt


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