Plasma, Accessibility and Keyboard

[Frederik Gladhorn]

Hello,

I've run Plasma Next just a little bit in the last few days and I'm pleasantly surprised, 
great work everyone.

I'm also happy to see that http://blogs.fsfe.org/gladhorn/2014/07/07/plasma-next-accessibility/ got a little attention.
I guess it's a good idea to give some more background and motivation here.

I get asked every so often (and it pops up on the Orca mailing list) what the state of 
KDE Accessibility is. Many people are curious about trying a new environment that has 
been so far completely closed off from them due to their dependency on assistive 
tools.

KDE does a great job with theming and high/low contrast/inverted color schemes, 
font settings, etc which is actually a huge benefit for many with sight deficencies. 
Keep up the good work everyone :)

One area were we have been weak so far is making KDE and Plasma available to those 
depending on screen readers, braille and other technology to enable them to use their 
computer. The good news is that with Qt 5 we got rid of many obstacles, the whole 
accessibility framework got a huge overhaul and is a good reason to switch to Qt 5 
alone, if nothing else. That includes Qt Quick, so Plasma has no excuse not to be 
accessible any longer. I'm much looking forward to the time when we have our first 
blind users reporting success and satisfaction with the UI.

I can do much of the plumbing when it comes to making sure we expose good 
information to the tools. One area that needs improvements (I think, please prove me 
wrong!) is keyboard handling.

I'd like to appeal to the designers and usability experts to take keyboard usage into 
account. Please put away your mouse and use the desktop with a keyboard only for a 
day or two.

This is also an plea to the developers to work on implementing keyboard handling and 
focus handling, both are essential to allow many users to fully  use the desktop. For Qt 
Quick make sure that the activeFocus property is working, that tab, up, down, left, 
right, space and enter do their job.

Finally I'd like to reach out to the advanced users and pretty much anyone listening 
here to come up with documentation on the wiki on how to use Plasma using the 
keyboard. I started a simple page that needs to be improved. I guess not everything is 
possible yet... https://userbase.kde.org/Accessibility/Plasma

Thanks for reading this far.
Let's make Plasma rock. For everyone.

Cheers,
Frederik

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