Plasma Accessibility: Kickoff Application starter and Focus handling

[chrys]

Howdy Plasma List,

My name is chrys and I m very new here. I currently started with 
Frederik (my mentor) some work on Plasma Accessibility. We try to bring 
an Accessibility team back on rail and try improve the situation here. 
We already make some progress here and continue our work in that area.

First of all, thanks for those an wonderful desktop environment.

Our first goal is to make next plasma release initial "useful" for bind 
people. that means we want to be able to do basic tasks.

1. be able to use the desktop

2. Launch an application

3. Switch between applications and windows.

point 1. and 3. are already done :) yay!

I currently work to make the default application launcher "kickoff" 
accessible. I already have an local patch floating around to add the 
missing A11y Name/ Role to the entries. While i did my tests I 
recognized that the focus handling of that the focus handling of Kickoff 
is completely broken. In fact the highlighted area what represents the 
current selected item is just an colorful overlay (some kind of fake 
focus), but the real focus is always set to the search field. The 
problem is that screen readers need to know what widget or item 
currently has the focus to present it properly. if the focus never 
changes, like in this case it never go away from the search entry, the 
screen reader does not see the fake focus. so it never knows that you 
change the item.

I have 3 efforts here:

1. i want to sensitize that proper focus handling is important, because 
i see this behave in other areas too (i.e. clipboard manager plasmoid in 
panel) and want to start an discussion how to avoid this behave in futur 
since it is just wrong...

2. i tried to fix the kickoff focus issue. but i failed badly. is there 
someone out there, with deeper knowledge of kickoffs structure, who can 
help me out fixing the keyboard and focus handling?

3. we should also consider checking the other widgets and fix those if 
needed. I currently evaluate what else is affected by this issue. what 
do you think?

for questions or feedback just let me know.

so greetings from your new Accessibility Team :)

chrys