[Accessibility] QT accessibility roadmap.

[Luke Yelavich]

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