[Kde-accessibility] [orca-list] Linux Accessibility: qt-at-spi 0.2 released

Fri Mar 16 04:49:16 UTC 2012

Hi, Frederik,

Thanks for the tip on the environment variable you use for gnome apps
in KDE.  I will see about posting a write-up to the wiki pages you
linked to as well as filing some bug reports.  As for copying the
kde-accessibility list, excluding them from this thread was not
intentional and is now remedied with this message.  Thanks for
pointing that out.

Regards,
Alex M

On 3/15/12, Frederik Gladhorn <gladhorn at kde.org> wrote:
> On Thursday 15. March 2012 09.16.26 Alex Midence wrote:
>> Hi.
>>
>> I've been testing KDE and can verify that there are some things that
>> are still in need of work with regard to accessibility.  However, I
>> found the following to be true:
>>
>> Setting the menus to "classic" in kde renders the application menu
>> accessible with alt f1
>> Most utilities not requiring text input such as the music players, the
>> file managers and system customization utilities work rather well.
>> Applications such as Kate and Kopete which have text entry areas did
>> not work well for me.  If accessed from Gnome, they crashed and the
>> KDE crash handler would come up.  If they didn't crash and I typed a
>> line of text say:
>>
>> #include <iostream>
>>
>> and went left or right with the arrow keys, tried to use flat review
>> or on the numpad or did anything else to review what had typed, I'd
>> get dead silence and the thing would eventually crash.
>
> I'd be happy if you could add information to this wiki page:
> http://userbase.kde.org/Accessibility/Application_Overview
>
> Kate's text area will not be accessible before KDE 4.9. It looks similar for
> Konsole. Qt Creator needs some patches in Qt, most likely they'll hit Qt
> 4.8.2
> which will also still take a few months still.
>
>
>> Other apps like Korganizer, Kwallet, and the package manager front
>> ends had sporadic performance.  This means that some areas were
>> accessible and others were not.
> Here it would be interesting to either add information to the wiki I
> mentioned
> above, or if it's just small things, start filing bugs. bugs.kde.org is the
> right place. For many things the fix is very simple but these applications
> were
> never tested with accessibility in mind. Please help us learn and
> understand.
>
>
>> In some of my experimenting, I launched some of the KDE apps from the
>> Gnome-terminal so I could observe some of the output from at-spi and
>> company.  In cases where multi-line text entry areas were not being
>> spoken, I got messages refering to problems with children of objects.
>> I wish I had the exact output lines handy so I could forward them to
>> the list.
>>
>> Lastly, and most disturbing of all, in my opinion, I tried a few
>> things based on some questions which Krishnakant had posed in an
>> earlier e-mail.  I launched previously accessible applications like
>> Libreoffice, Gedit and Firefox from within KDE using the alt f2 run
>> application dialog and the application menu reachable with alt f1.  In
>> both instances, these  applications didn't read at all.  Why this is,
>> I do not know but, I wonder if it's not tied with the problem qt apps
>> have in making children of objects accessible.
> KDE's desktop Plasma uses a technology (QGraphicsView) where currently no
> accessibility implementation exists. That is why neither alt-f1 nor alt-f2
> will currently be read.
>
>> I wonder if the fact
>> that these applications are being brought up from KDE using the KDE
>> window manager would somehow turn them into children of that window
>> manager and its inaccessible properties are inherited by its child
>> objects.  I could be totally wrong here since I very dimly understand
>> the relationship between objects in a GUI at this level but, it's a
>> speculation I've been tossing around in my head for a few days.  To
>> really put the icing on the cake, I also noticed that the
>> application-specific  orca preferences dialog either could not be
>> brought up or could not be read from within any QT aplication I pulled
>> up either in Gnome or KDE itself.
>
> Applications inherit no accessibility state. I usually test in an KDE
> environment. There can be two things that change that I can think of.
> One: an environment variable is not being set, I don't know enough about how
> Gnome a11y works, but I need to export GTK_MODULES="gail:atk-bridge" for
> Gnome
> apps to work in a KDE environment.
> Second: the style can change. There are attempts to style Gtk applications
> with the Oxygen style of KDE. Depending on the implementation this might
> actually render them inaccessible. I do not thing this is the case though.
>
> So most likely there are just some settings/environment tweaks that get set
> for Gnome but not for KDE (yet).
>
> So keep pushing and tell people what is needed. I would also appreciate if
> you
> used the kde accessibilty mailing list to show kde people that you are
> interested.
>
> Cheers
> Frederik
>
>
>> Sorry about the data dump.  Been meaning to come on here and post for
>> the last few days but my work has really picked up and I have been
>> extraordinarily busy.  I'll be posting another e-mail later today to
>> this list, the kde accessibility list and the vinux-support list
>> containing the links to the multidesktop virtual machine I created
>> with Ubuntu 12.04 beta.  I thought it was going to be an html file
>> but, time forgives none and if I don't get around to posting something
>> today be it as simple as an e-mail with links and instructions, I fear
>> I never will.
>>
>> Thanks.
>> Alex M
>>
>> On 3/14/12, Luke Yelavich <themuso at ubuntu.com> wrote:
>> > On Thu, Mar 15, 2012 at 04:33:34AM EST, hackingKK wrote:
>> >> Wow, this is a great news indeed.
>> >> So can we expect a fairly accessible kde desktop with Ubuntu 12.04?
>> >> Are we going to get all these wonderful updates into kubuntu?
>> >> If not, I guess at least we can have qt atspi bridge into Ubuntu for
>> >> running qt apps?
>> >
>> > Whilst some bits of KDE may be accessible with the latest QT at-spi
>> > bridge,
>> > there is no certainty that KDE will be usable with orca, particularly
>> > with
>> > regards to keyboard navigation.
>> >
>> > Luke
>> > _______________________________________________
>> > orca-list mailing list
>> > orca-list at gnome.org
>> > http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/orca-list
>> > Visit http://live.gnome.org/Orca for more information on Orca.
>> > The manual is at
>> > http://library.gnome.org/users/gnome-access-guide/nightly/ats-2.html
>> > The FAQ is at http://live.gnome.org/Orca/FrequentlyAskedQuestions
>> > Log bugs and feature requests at http://bugzilla.gnome.org
>> > Find out how to help at http://live.gnome.org/Orca/HowCanIHelp
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> orca-list mailing list
>> orca-list at gnome.org
>> http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/orca-list
>> Visit http://live.gnome.org/Orca for more information on Orca.
>> The manual is at
>> http://library.gnome.org/users/gnome-access-guide/nightly/ats-2.html The
>> FAQ is at http://live.gnome.org/Orca/FrequentlyAskedQuestions
>> Log bugs and feature requests at http://bugzilla.gnome.org
>> Find out how to help at http://live.gnome.org/Orca/HowCanIHelp
> _______________________________________________
> orca-list mailing list
> orca-list at gnome.org
> http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/orca-list
> Visit http://live.gnome.org/Orca for more information on Orca.
> The manual is at
> http://library.gnome.org/users/gnome-access-guide/nightly/ats-2.html
> The FAQ is at http://live.gnome.org/Orca/FrequentlyAskedQuestions
> Log bugs and feature requests at http://bugzilla.gnome.org
> Find out how to help at http://live.gnome.org/Orca/HowCanIHelp
>