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

[Olaf Jan Schmidt]

[ Éric Bischoff ]
> Ah yes, it works perfectly. See
>    http://opensource.bureau-cornavin.com/settings/flashy.png
> The colours were set in the KDE control center.

Yes, it mostly works, but the lineal text is still in black, also some frames 
and the text in some dialogs (e.g. settings). This is impossible to read with 
a white-on-black colour scheme.

The text and background colours are also not applied to the appearance of the 
text itself, according to the setting that Oliver described.

> Okay, is there something else that we can start

KDE has a monochrome icon theme in the kdeaccessibility module.
You can convert it from Black-On-White to something else (e.g. Yellow-On-Blue) 
in kcontrol: Appearance & Themes > Icons > Advanced > Set Effect > To 
Monochrome. It would be nice if these settings were picked up. If you need 
additional high contrast monochrome icons for OpenOffice, then I am sure 
Danny Allen would be willing to draw them for you.

I assume that a general check for accessibility obstacles (complete control 
via keyboard possible, no timeouts for people with slow response time) has 
already been made, since this is desktop independent.

The KDE Text-to-Speech system (ktts) is integrated in KOffice, meaning that 
you can click on a menu entry to have the text read. But this goes beyond 
normal desktop integration, and it is no solution for blind people, who need 
audio and braille feedback for the complete user interface.

> without waiting for Qt4 and KDE 4 ?

KDE4 is currently not stable enough to start OpenOffice integration work with 
it. If you wish to at least begin with something, then I suggest that you 
have a look at porting OpenOffice over to Qt4, which already has some stable 
releases, but the code will only be useful after KDE4 is released (which will 
still take some time).

AT-SPI support is still missing in the current releases of Qt4, but the 
protocol is currently only used by GNOME assistive technologies and can only 
be used if GNOME is running anyway. This will change for KDE4.

> You have been mentioning fonts, Olaf ? 

Yes. If you set a really big font size in KDE3, is it then picked up by the 
OpenOffice user interface? Some users with low vision can only read light 20 
pt text on a dark background.

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/