[Development] Fwd: Qt 5.2 and Qt creator accessibility issues on Mac OS X

[Frederik Gladhorn]

Onsdag 26. mars 2014 20.39.24 skrev Vincenzo Rubano:
> Hi all,
> 
> this message is especially for Frederik. As I promised, this is the message
> I sent to Heikkinen Jani (the Qt release manager) some time ago with a
> detailed report of Qt Creator accessibility issues and the report of a
> critical accessibility issue that affects the Qt installer.

Thanks for being persistent :) my comments are inline below.

> 
> Cheers
> 
> Vincenzo.
> 
> Inizio messaggio inoltrato:
> > Oggetto: Qt 5.2 and accessibility issues on Mac OS X
> > Data: 08 marzo 2014 12:55:12 CET
> > A: Heikkinen Jani <jani.heikkinen at digia.com>
> > 
> > Hi Jani,
> > 
> > I am Vincenzo Rubano, an italian blind computer science blind student.
> > I wrote to you some time ago to let you know that there were some
> > important accessibility issues in QT Creator and the QT installer (Mac OS
> > X versions). You suggested me reporting these issues using the bug
> > tracker, but the registration form is not accessible due to the presence
> > of a visual captcha.

As written in private mail, sadly this will not work until we have a newer 
jira version, in the mean time it's possible to contact the jira admins to get 
and account without the captcha.

> > 
> > I’m going to report to you all the details about the issues I found and I
> > hope that they will be fixed soon, so that I can start using QT (together
> > with other blind people that may want to do so).
> > 
> > Some details about my setup:
> > I experienced the issues bot with a Macbook Air 13 “ 2013 with an I7
> > processor and 8 gb ram and a macbook pro 15 “ late 2010 with an I7
> > processor and 4 gb RAM. Both machines are running Mac OS X 10.9.2. I’ve
> > used QT Creator 3.0.1 and QT 5.2.1. I made sure that there weren’t apps
> > running in the background consuming significant resources when I
> > experienced these issues.
> > 
> > Let’s start with the installer issues:
> > I experienced these issues both with the onLine and the ofLine QT
> > installer for Mac OS X. The problem is that, after opening the installer
> > application, the first installation window that appears is not accessible
> > using Voiceover. The screen reader, in fact, can only see: - The standard
> > buttons to close and resize the window;
> > - The title of the window;
> > - An “unknown” element that I can interact with.
> > After interacting with the unknown element, though, Voiceover tells me
> > that it doesn’t contain anything. Due to this, I am not able to install
> > QT using the installer.

This is a know issue. Sadly this won't be resolved until we move the installer 
to Qt 5. I'm not sure what the progress is, but it's in the works. It's the 
same problem for Linux, only Windows was possible to be fixed with Qt 4.

> > Regarding QT Creator:
> > Generally speaking, the program is a bit unresponsive with Voiceover
> > (there are delays from executing a command and getting feedback from
> > Voiceover). However, the worst issue is in the project creation window
> > that you can open by pressing cmd+n. That window is so unresponsive with
> > Voiceover that between executing a command and getting some feedback from
> > Voiceover you could have to wait up to 5/7 seconds (starting from a
> > minimum of 1/2 seconds). In addition to this, in the project creation
> > window, Voiceover sees some different groups (e.g. “projects”,
> > “applications”, “libraries”, “other project”, “Non-QT project”). Since
> > they are groups, I can suppose that interacting with them I should see
> > something inside of them; but this is not true. If I interact with these
> > groups Voiceover tells me that they are empty. Finally, in the project
> > creation window, Voiceover sees a combo box that (from what I understood)
> > should allow me to select some different template categories to show up
> > in the window. The value of the combo is “all templates” but Voiceover
> > tells me that I cannot adjust the value of the combo.
> > 
> > There might be other accessibility issues in QT Creator and the QT
> > Framework; unfortunately I am not able to investigate further and report
> > them to you until I can create a QT Application by taking advantage (or
> > trying to) of the QT Creator features.
> > 
> > Let me know if you need further details or any additional information. I’m
> > available to perform any additional test if needed as well as testing
> > eventual patches/build versions that could fix these issues.

I am currently working on this in general. Qt Creator is built on top of Qt, 
so the improvements need to happen in Qt itself for the most part.

There are some good news - I have a first patch to enable notifications for 
Mac Accessibility, it still needs cleanup, but the patch is not as big as I 
feared. For the first time I have the VoiceOver focus and the visual focus in 
sync (both ways). Once that patch is done I need to look at performance again 
- VoiceOver seems to be quite bad with deep hierarchies that we have. Another 
aspect is that it tends to query the accessible tree a lot. I'm not sure how 
much my current work improves that already, I may have to introduce a bit more 
caching.

Generally I'm optimistic that things will improve in the Qt 5.3 and 5.4 time 
range.
I'd like to re-visit and discuss creator accessibility once the foundation is 
in place.

Thanks for the feedback.

Greetings,
Frederik


> > 
> > Cheers,
> > 
> > Vincenzo.

-- 
Best regards,
Frederik Gladhorn
Senior Software Engineer - Digia, Qt
Visit us on: http://qt.digia.com