From frederik.gladhorn at digia.com Wed May 14 11:01:21 2014 From: frederik.gladhorn at digia.com (Frederik Gladhorn) Date: Wed, 14 May 2014 11:01:21 +0200 Subject: [Accessibility] Welcome Message-ID: <6253495.DL4FGJ0Fi7@varney> Welcome to this mailing list! This is the freshly created a11y mailing list for Qt and I am looking forward to lots of good feedback from everyone. Beginner questions are welcome, but let's stay on topic, this is about making Qt and Qt applications usable by everyone, including those using assistive technology of whichever kind. One thing that triggered the creation of this mailing list is that Digia's Oslo office will cooperate with Norsk Regnesentral (Norwegian Computing Center) to improve accessibility on mobile Qt apps. Read more about the project here: http://blog.qt.digia.com/blog/2014/05/14/accessibility-in-qt-5-3/ For me as maintainer of accessibility in Qt this means I get to spend even more time on all kinds of accessibility issues and work with you and the other Digians on making Qt work for you. -- Best regards, Frederik Gladhorn Senior Software Engineer - Digia, Qt Visit us on: http://qt.digia.com From Trenton.Schulz at nr.no Tue May 20 11:54:54 2014 From: Trenton.Schulz at nr.no (Trenton Schulz) Date: Tue, 20 May 2014 09:54:54 +0000 Subject: [Accessibility] Seeking input from experts with mobile assistive devices Message-ID: <92D50560-094D-45A0-8791-777F49E9DF11@nr.no> Hello everyone, My name is Trenton Schulz. I’m a senior research scientist at the Norwegian Computing Center (Norsk Regnesentral), and I’m working with Digia on our BestApps project [1] for increasing the accessibility of mobile apps. Currently, we are doing some user investigation about how different people use assistive technology (AT) with their smartphones and apps. In connection with this, I would be interested in finding people that would be interested in participating in a small interview (either over telephone, Skype, or email) about how they use this technology. We are holding a workshop connected to this as well on 19 June in Oslo. So, if you are interested (or know anyone), please let me know via email and I can send more details. Your input can help make future Qt applications more accessible and easier to use for everyone. Best regards, -- Trenton Schulz Senior Research Scientist Norwegian Computing Center [1]: http://www.nr.no/en/projects/bestapps-–-best-practices-accessible-applications From leos at uvic.ca Wed May 21 06:49:57 2014 From: leos at uvic.ca (Leo Spalteholz) Date: Wed, 21 May 2014 04:49:57 +0000 Subject: [Accessibility] Seeking input from experts with mobile assistive devices In-Reply-To: <92D50560-094D-45A0-8791-777F49E9DF11@nr.no> References: <92D50560-094D-45A0-8791-777F49E9DF11@nr.no> Message-ID: <2F2B62D7-214F-4946-A61C-D2CF5716BBF6@uvic.ca> Hi Trenton and qt-accessibility. I thought I would introduce myself and the organization I work for. My name is Leo Spalteholz and I manage the engineering team at CanAssist. We develop technology and devices for people with disabilities where there is a gap in the commercial market. We’ve been using Qt for our desktop applications since I started in 2004, and since last year also for our mobile apps. We create a wide range of assistive technology everything from mechanical adaptions to access recreation (http://www.canassist.ca/EN/main/programs/technologies-and-devices/sports/outdoor-ball-launcher-for-dogs.html#video ) to accessible cameras (http://www.canassist.ca/EN/main/programs/technologies-and-devices/sports/single-button-camera.html#video ) to various apps for people with disabilities (https://itunes.apple.com/us/artist/university-of-victoria/id598687546 ). We work a lot with individuals with physical disabilities, and along with the rest of the industry have migrated primarily to mobile development. So we are primarily concerned with Voiceover support and switch accessibility. We have primarily concentrated past app development efforts on iOS because platform accessibility and accessibility app support is still far ahead of android for most of our clients. However we are naturally interested in cross platform development so we have switched to Qt for most of our new, in-development apps to be able to ship Android and iOS simultaneously with our very small team. We’ve worked with hundreds of individuals with disabilities over the years across the age and disability spectrum. Happy to help if we can. Regards, Leo Spalteholz Engineering Manager CanAssist @ UVic 1-250-721-7302 On May 20, 2014, at 2:54 AM, Trenton Schulz wrote: > Hello everyone, > > My name is Trenton Schulz. I’m a senior research scientist at the Norwegian Computing Center (Norsk Regnesentral), and I’m working with Digia on our BestApps project [1] for increasing the accessibility of mobile apps. > > Currently, we are doing some user investigation about how different people use assistive technology (AT) with their smartphones and apps. In connection with this, I would be interested in finding people that would be interested in participating in a small interview (either over telephone, Skype, or email) about how they use this technology. We are holding a workshop connected to this as well on 19 June in Oslo. > > So, if you are interested (or know anyone), please let me know via email and I can send more details. Your input can help make future Qt applications more accessible and easier to use for everyone. > > Best regards, > > -- > Trenton Schulz > Senior Research Scientist > Norwegian Computing Center > > [1]: http://www.nr.no/en/projects/bestapps-–-best-practices-accessible-applications > _______________________________________________ > Accessibility mailing list > Accessibility at qt-project.org > http://lists.qt-project.org/mailman/listinfo/accessibility From Trenton.Schulz at nr.no Wed May 21 09:41:45 2014 From: Trenton.Schulz at nr.no (Trenton Schulz) Date: Wed, 21 May 2014 07:41:45 +0000 Subject: [Accessibility] Seeking input from experts with mobile assistive devices In-Reply-To: <2F2B62D7-214F-4946-A61C-D2CF5716BBF6@uvic.ca> References: <92D50560-094D-45A0-8791-777F49E9DF11@nr.no> <2F2B62D7-214F-4946-A61C-D2CF5716BBF6@uvic.ca> Message-ID: On May 21, 2014, at 06:50 , Leo Spalteholz wrote: > Hi Trenton and qt-accessibility. > > I thought I would introduce myself and the organization I work for. My name is Leo Spalteholz and I manage the engineering team at CanAssist. We develop technology and devices for people with disabilities where there is a gap in the commercial market. We’ve been using Qt for our desktop applications since I started in 2004, and since last year also for our mobile apps. > We create a wide range of assistive technology everything from mechanical adaptions to access recreation (http://www.canassist.ca/EN/main/programs/technologies-and-devices/sports/outdoor-ball-launcher-for-dogs.html#video ) to accessible cameras (http://www.canassist.ca/EN/main/programs/technologies-and-devices/sports/single-button-camera.html#video ) to various apps for people with disabilities (https://itunes.apple.com/us/artist/university-of-victoria/id598687546 ). This is inspiring stuff. It’s great to see when technology makes life better for people. > We work a lot with individuals with physical disabilities, and along with the rest of the industry have migrated primarily to mobile development. So we are primarily concerned with Voiceover support and switch accessibility. We have primarily concentrated past app development efforts on iOS because platform accessibility and accessibility app support is still far ahead of android for most of our clients. However we are naturally interested in cross platform development so we have switched to Qt for most of our new, in-development apps to be able to ship Android and iOS simultaneously with our very small team. > > We’ve worked with hundreds of individuals with disabilities over the years across the age and disability spectrum. Happy to help if we can. Thank you, Leo. I would be interested in discussing how switch support works on smartphones as I haven’t seen much of that. I’ll contact you off-list. Best regards, -- Trenton -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: signature.asc Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 203 bytes Desc: Message signed with OpenPGP using GPGMail URL: From luke.yelavich at canonical.com Mon May 26 11:18:36 2014 From: luke.yelavich at canonical.com (Luke Yelavich) Date: Mon, 26 May 2014 11:18:36 +0200 Subject: [Accessibility] QT accessibility roadmap. Message-ID: <20140526091836.GA32330@acapella> Hi Folks, Firstly I would like to introduce myself. I am Luke Yelavich, and am working for Canonical. I am somewhat involved with the ubuntu on phones project, aka ubuntu touch. This project is using Qt quite heavily. I am starting to ramp up work to make sure ubuntu touch has a good accessibility story going forward. Whilst having a quick glance through the Qt QML accessibility code, I have noticed a few things that are yet to be implemented, particularly accessible object relationships. This got me to wondering whether there is any defined roadmap for Qt accessibility going forward, particularly with regards to QMl and implementing accessibility support there. Thanks in advance. Luke From frederik.gladhorn at digia.com Mon May 26 13:16:15 2014 From: frederik.gladhorn at digia.com (Frederik Gladhorn) Date: Mon, 26 May 2014 13:16:15 +0200 Subject: [Accessibility] QT accessibility roadmap. In-Reply-To: <20140526091836.GA32330@acapella> References: <20140526091836.GA32330@acapella> Message-ID: <2152393.tc9aFu5svh@varney> Hi Luke, thanks for joining us and asking good questions :) And congratulations to your new speech-dispatcher maintainer role! Mandag 26. mai 2014 11.18.36 skrev Luke Yelavich: > Hi Folks, > Firstly I would like to introduce myself. I am Luke Yelavich, and am working > for Canonical. I am somewhat involved with the ubuntu on phones project, > aka ubuntu touch. This project is using Qt quite heavily. I am starting to > ramp up work to make sure ubuntu touch has a good accessibility story going > forward. This is great to hear. I was actually wondering what the story of various phone projects in this direction will be. Some things are really easy and fun to do in Qt Quick, for example you can simply zoom the whole scene for magnification and will even have crisp fonts when zoomed in. When it comes to screen readers, I'm not aware of anything open-source that's available and fitting, so this is obviously an interesting project. Assuming there will be an open source project to create a mobile screen reader, especially when it's geard towards Qt applications, I'd be happy to discuss and help where I can. > Whilst having a quick glance through the Qt QML accessibility code, I have > noticed a few things that are yet to be implemented, particularly > accessible object relationships. This got me to wondering whether there is > any defined roadmap for Qt accessibility going forward, particularly with > regards to QMl and implementing accessibility support there. I'd appreciate bug reports for missing functionallity in accessibility. Please make sure to set the component to "GUI: Accessibility" and it'll be on my radar. I filed one for the relations mentioned above: https://bugreports.qt-project.org/browse/QTBUG-39281 We don't have a real roadmap for accessibility but rather focus on what we deem important and right now mobile is the big topic we're trying to tackle. I created a JIRA dashboard that lists all bugs/feature requests for accessibility: https://bugreports.qt-project.org/secure/Dashboard.jspa?selectPageId=12514 Currently I'm focusing a lot on iOS and Jan-Arve works on the Android parts at the moment. Of course we fix cross-platform issues as much as possible. I hope this helps. Feel free to catch me on irc as well. Greetings, Frederik > > Thanks in advance. > > Luke > _______________________________________________ > Accessibility mailing list > Accessibility at qt-project.org > http://lists.qt-project.org/mailman/listinfo/accessibility -- Best regards, Frederik Gladhorn Senior Software Engineer - Digia, Qt Visit us on: http://qt.digia.com From luke.yelavich at canonical.com Mon May 26 14:38:57 2014 From: luke.yelavich at canonical.com (Luke Yelavich) Date: Mon, 26 May 2014 14:38:57 +0200 Subject: [Accessibility] QT accessibility roadmap. In-Reply-To: <2152393.tc9aFu5svh@varney> References: <20140526091836.GA32330@acapella> <2152393.tc9aFu5svh@varney> Message-ID: <20140526123857.GA2915@acapella> On Mon, May 26, 2014 at 01:16:15PM CEST, Frederik Gladhorn wrote: > Hi Luke, > > thanks for joining us and asking good questions :) > And congratulations to your new speech-dispatcher maintainer role! Thanks, I am looking forward to the challenge it will bring. > This is great to hear. I was actually wondering what the story of various > phone projects in this direction will be. > Some things are really easy and fun to do in Qt Quick, for example you can > simply zoom the whole scene for magnification and will even have crisp fonts > when zoomed in. This sounds awesome, however we wil likely require a solution that can also zoom in on non-Qt apps, given our ultimate goal is a converged shell environment, and we will still be caring about users who wish to use apps that are not based on Qt. > When it comes to screen readers, I'm not aware of anything open-source that's > available and fitting, so this is obviously an interesting project. Assuming > there will be an open source project to create a mobile screen reader, > especially when it's geard towards Qt applications, I'd be happy to discuss > and help where I can. At this point, Orca is likely our best option, given that it is less work to adapt and extend where required, and given that most of Orca's processing is done within the libatspi client main loop, performance should not be a problem. There is a question to memory usage, but we will cross that bridge when we come to it. At-spi doesn't yet work with touch input events, but again its easier to extend and adapt where required, as GNOMe upstream is likely to want to do something with touch and accessibility in the future. In short, we already have the technologies to help with accessibility on GNU/Linux and Qt, they just need extending to work in a touch/converged environment. > > Whilst having a quick glance through the Qt QML accessibility code, I have > > noticed a few things that are yet to be implemented, particularly > > accessible object relationships. This got me to wondering whether there is > > any defined roadmap for Qt accessibility going forward, particularly with > > regards to QMl and implementing accessibility support there. > > I'd appreciate bug reports for missing functionallity in accessibility. Please > make sure to set the component to "GUI: Accessibility" and it'll be on my > radar. I filed one for the relations mentioned above: > https://bugreports.qt-project.org/browse/QTBUG-39281 Ok thanks, I'll make a note to create an account there, and will file bugs accordingly. > We don't have a real roadmap for accessibility but rather focus on what we > deem important and right now mobile is the big topic we're trying to tackle. I > created a JIRA dashboard that lists all bugs/feature requests for > accessibility: > https://bugreports.qt-project.org/secure/Dashboard.jspa?selectPageId=12514 > > Currently I'm focusing a lot on iOS and Jan-Arve works on the Android parts at > the moment. Of course we fix cross-platform issues as much as possible. Ok no worries. I hope to come up to speed with the at-spi adaptor code for Linux and will help where I can from that side. > I hope this helps. Feel free to catch me on irc as well. It is a great help, thanks. Luke From trumpton13 at trumpton.org.uk Mon May 26 22:14:08 2014 From: trumpton13 at trumpton.org.uk (Steve Clarke) Date: Mon, 26 May 2014 21:14:08 +0100 Subject: [Accessibility] Three Screen Readers and Braille Display Emulation with Windows Message-ID: <1418644.6i0p4CC0Bg@crunchie> Dear All, It's great to see positive work being done in enabling and enhancing QT application accessibility. My name is Steve Clarke, and I'm an electronic engineer in the Space industry by day, but by night, I find myself tinkering with various bits of software. My other half is blind, and uses Windows, Jaws screen-reader and a Pacmate braille display, and I do whatever I can to make her life easier - this currently means developing applications using QT. I thought I'd share different ways QT applications can be tested for accessibility, particularly with the screen readers and braille displays - most of which are extraordinarily expensive (you won't get much change out of €3500 for a reasonable display and screen reader, and that only lets you see a 40 character window of the entire page at any one time! - it's like looking at the internet through a letterbox). WINDOWS SCREEN READERS There are several screen-readers available, each of which can drive a large number of braille displays, in addition to speaking the menus / screen positions - I'll quickly introduce three of them ... NVDA (Non Visual Desktop Access) - www.nvaccess.org This is a comprehensive screen-reader written by two blind enthusiasts, who were appalled by the cost of accessibility features / applications. It supports the IAccessible2 protocol, and is a free download / install / use. Jaws - www.freedomscientific.com This is a professional screen-reader, that is not at all cheap. I believe this to use the MSAA protocol. The demonstration version is a free download, and runs for 40 minutes at a time. Windows Eyes - www.gwmicro.com This is another professional screen-reader. It also has a demonstration version, which runs for 60 days. DEBUGGING AND DEVELOPMENT Unfortunately, each of the screen-readers shown above, presents information differently / works to different levels of success with different widgets, and, may work correctly with the spoken output, then promptly fails when reading on a braille display. As the programs and displays are expensive, an alternative approach to testing must be sought - taking these in reverse order ... Windows Eyes This program has a simulator, that can be enabled. This simulator shows what comes up on the braille display. https://bugreports.qt-project.org/secure/attachment/40350/BrailleEmulatorExample_XP_WindowsEyes.png Jaws If you use version 14, rather than version 15, you can also use the braille emulator. https://bugreports.qt-project.org/secure/attachment/40348/BrailleEmulatorExample_XP_Jaws14_BrailleViewer.pn g Non Visual Desktop Access This one is much more complex. It doesn't have a simulator, and the only way to see what would be output to a braille display is to look at the log files, but nothing is written in the log files unless a braille display is connected. A work-around is to use BRLTTY, which is a braille emulator/driver for console terminals, and you can enable the simulator in BRLTTY. The problem that most then discover is that BRLTTY only displays the text if the terminal is active - NVDA, however, does log everything it is trying to send to the braille display. https://bugreports.qt-project.org/secure/attachment/40349/BrailleEmulatorExample_XP_NVDA_BRLTTY.png That's it from me - hopefully, I can get back to doing some useful testing - just got a bathroom suite to install - there just aren't enough hours in the day :-( Steve -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: