[Kde-accessibility] Re: Fwd: Re: qt-at-spi on Arch Linux

[Kyle]

Well, I have done some experimentation, and I am impressed with the 
state of things so far, after all I've heard about how unusable KDE and 
QT are. I got KDE up and running, and somehow got kaccessible speaking using
export QT_ACCESSIBILITY=1
in a file I named /etc/profile.d/qtaccessibility.sh. It's far from 
perfect, and there's still rather little I can do in KDE yet, but I'm 
pleasantly surprised by the feedback I'm getting, especially in the 
system activities, as well as the news of major improvements coming very 
soon. I even was able to navigate the account setup in kmail with little 
trouble. It does crash and burn at the configuration screen, however.

As for the qt-at-spi bridge, I can't seem to get it working at all while 
GNOME is running. I did all the gconf stuff, but I already knew that I 
was using at-spi2, because the only registry that is listed in my 
processes is /usr/lib/at-spi2-core/at-spi2-registryd. Could the issue 
with that be that the "--use-gnome-session" option is specified on its 
command line? Strangely enough, if I have KDE running and run Orca and 
the example calculator application using the run command, the calculator 
mostly works. The only major problem is that no text on the calculator 
display other than "0" is visible to Orca, and after a short time, Orca 
becomes unresponsive and fails to restart properly, but this happened 
after trying and retrying to run the calculator example and then to 
navigate the KDE desktop, especially the run window (alt-f2) and the 
system activities (control-escape). The real surprise is how well all 
this is working in spite of the fact that I only really tried it with QT 
4.7. I installed qt-git from AUR and thought that would likely pull in 
the latest and greatest from 4.8, but for some reason, Orca no longer 
speaks QT applications with KDE running at all now, even after 
rebuilding qt-at-spi against qt-git.

Overall, things look very good for the future of QT and KDE using a 
screen reader, and I especially like the fact that once I managed to get 
kaccessible working, every time I load a KDE application from within 
GNOME, kaccessible loads up automatically and speaks what it can, even 
though Orca still claims that the application is "inaccessible." I look 
forward to the day, and it looks like it could come sooner than I 
thought, when I will have the choice to use GNOME or KDE, and I can base 
my choice on what I like or dislike about each environment rather than 
how usable it is with a screen reader, and even run applications from 
both GNOME and KDE no matter which desktop environment I ultimately 
choose. I'm also sending a copy of this message to the kde-accessibility 
list, in case anyone else there can help me get things running a bit 
more smoothly or has any other ideas, suggestions or comments. Thanks 
very much for the help so far.
~Kyle