[Kde-accessibility] OpenOffice and KDE4 Accessiibilty [was: Orca/KDE Integration]

[Éric Bischoff]

Le Vendredi 1 Septembre 2006 11:36, Olaf Jan Schmidt a écrit :
> Thanks a lot for your offer to help. I will keep you informed of all
> further developments concerning KDE4 Accessibility.

Hi Olaf,

(less mailing lists on CC: as this is becoming more technical)

I am the author of the KDE settings backend in OpenOffice.org. Kendy is the 
author of the KDE display and theming engine (VCL) in OpenOffice.org. Oliver 
is the accessibility expert at OpenOffice.org. Nice to meet you.

I think that we could all put our knowledge together and work an accessibility 
support in OpenOffice.org. We use to meet on irc.freenode.net, channel 
#kde-ooo. KDE/OOo integration efforts are summed up on 
http://kde.openoffice.org.

I would prefer not wait on KDE 4 and start right now, so it works on KDE 3 
installations. But as you say below perharps that's simply not possible. Or 
perharps we can do that only for colour and font issues.

> One important accessibility issue independent from AT-SPI are colour and
> font settings for the GUI. The idea for KDE4 is to extend the system colour
> scheme to contain all colours needed in the user interface of applications,
> and ask all KDE applications to only use these system colours by default.
> It would be great if OpenOffice could pick those up once a version for KDE4
> is released. I hope we even manage to make the settings freedesktop.org
> settings shared by KDE, GNOME, OpenOffice, Mozilla and all other desktop
> applications.
>
> And is OpenOffice picking up the High Contrast icon theme settings if
> enabled in KDE3?

I don't know. Probably not. Kendy might know. If you tell me how to test that 
I can have a try.

We can start a discussion in private (me, Kendy, Oliver and you) to determine:
- from which setting in the KDE control center to pick that
  (both from the user interface and from the KDE API point of view)
- if we can map it to some OOo setting
- if we can support it in OOo's display engine (VCL)

> One important aspect of it is the setting that changes the 
> icon colour, so that you can convert them to e.g. Light Yellow on Dark Blue
> for a dark background colour theme.
>
> Of course document colours are excluded from this, but it would be very
> helpful for partially sighted people to be able to force a black or dark
> blue background and a light foreground colour for editing the document. Or
> is there already an option for this in OpenOffice?

I don't know. Oliver?

> The Qt accessibility bridge will only be available for Qt 4, and it will be
> a bit of work to write a complete bridge for all of OpenOffice to Qt
> Accessibility.

Ah.

> As a short-term solution, OpenOffice on KDE4 could load Gtk 
> if accessibility is enabled, as a long-term solution, it would be really
> nice to have have full support for Qt Accessibility - especially since Qt
> Accessibility is also working on Windows and Mac OS X.

Indeed. Okay, let's start ;-).

I started compiling a KDE 4 snapshot on my Mac under Linux. Does that compile 
okay? If I can't get a preview it will be hard to start working on it.

Another problem is that I have volunteered for MacOS X native port of OOo. 
Hmmm, they won't like me saying again I have something else to do before...

> Anyway, it seems all the AT-SPI activation issues are easily solvable with
> a bit of good will from all sides, so they do not need to influence the
> decision on the general approach of accessibility with KDE4 too much.

I don't know what AT-STI is. Anyway...


-- 
La monoculture informatique fragilise le système d'information, elle est aussi 
toxique pour les données de l'entreprise. (Guy Brand)