[Kde-accessibility] The Status of KDE Accessibility

[Jeremy Whiting]

Hello Robert and welcome,

On Sun, Oct 30, 2011 at 10:27 PM, Robert Cole <rkcole72984 at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hello, everyone.
>
> I just started working with KDE a day or two ago (for the first time) and I
> absolutely love it.
>
> I am a partially blind user, and I rely on screen magnification to use my
> system, and I am also beginning to work with screen readers across different
> operating system platforms (NVDA in Windows and Orca under GNOME on my Linux
> Mint 11 system).
> I switched my window manager to Compiz under my new KDE desktop because (for
> some reason) the Zoom feature under KWin was quite jumpy (I am sure there
> could be an easy solution to this, but I do not know where and how yet as I
> am completely new to the KDE desktop).

I haven't tried the kwin zoom feature yet (I should soon though)
There is also the kmag application you could try if you like.  It
probably has more options which may or may not help, but it is an
application, so will take some screen space itself.

> I have read different articles about the possibility of KDE being made
> accessible to the Orca screen reader, and I have also read a small bit about
> KTTS.

KTTS (which has been renamed to Jovie a couple years ago) is what
makes KDE Applications able to speak, but not like a screen reader.
For example the Knights game uses Jovie to speak the opponent's move
and the desktop uses Jovie to say the time if you set it to.

> My main question is this: What is the status of KDE Accessibility?

KDE Accessibility is in a work-in-progress state.  But with a bit of
tinkering you can try the latest code.  I'm not that familiar with
Linux Mint, but how KDE Accessibility works in regards to orca is
this.  Applications are written with the Qt framework which allows
accessibility plugins.  One such plugin for the linux desktop is
called qt-atspi bridge.  It bridges the Qt framework to the atspi2
interface which orca understands.  Unfortunately it required some
changes to Qt itself, and many crash fixes are in the not-yet-released
Qt 4.8.  If Linux Mint includes prerelease packages of Qt 4.8 and the
qt-atspi bridge, it should be just an install to test KDE with orca
(and setting a few settings on your machine).

At any rate http://community.kde.org/Accessibility is the main source
to look for information regarding KDE Accessibility.  The qt-atspi
bridge I mentioned is found under the first link Technical Information
for Application Developers, along with how to enable it for testing
with orca, etc.

> I do not currently know a lot about programming, but if there is anything
> which I can do to help with testing, I can learn what is needed and help in
> that fashion. I just do not know when to begin.

Testing is always very welcome. Also updating wiki pages, documentation, etc.

> Thank you for your time in reading this, and for any responses.

Thanks for asking.  The more help we can get the more work we can get done :)

BR,
Jeremy Whiting
>
> Kind regards.
>
> Take care.
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