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KDE Gains Full Accessibility Support
kandalf writes "Together with some other interesting news about making KDE and Gtk apps interoperable as well as porting OpenOffice to Qt/KDE, KDE gained accessibility support through the ATK interface from Sun with Qt - so KDE 3.2 will be 'accessibility ready' for the end user once coming out in January. Got the dot?"
This is already included in X server (on which KDE is running), if you press SHIFT+NumLock, you can navigate mouse cursor with arrows on numpad.
QT and GTK are toolkits - libraries that display stuff (windows, toolbars, buttons, text boxes, etc.) on the screen. KDE is a desktop environment - a set of programs that use the QT toolkit to create a user interface. ATK is a set of accessability standards, which are now supported by KDE and GNOME, the two majro desktop environments.
It's hard to be religious when certain people are never incinerated by bolts of lightning.
Knoppix actually does give you some choice as to the desktop you use - it's just slightly hidden. When you boot the CD, hit F2 (I think) and it'll give you a list of options that you can pass to the initialization scripts. Among these options is "desktop=foo". I prefer Fluxbox, as it loads significantly faster than KDE does from a CD. There's about 8 other WM's to try, so you've got your pick of the litter.
So, just type the following when you reach the Knoppix splash screen:
knoppix desktop=fluxbox
I know that I'm probably just feeding a troll here, but I just can't resist...
Look, KDE has been very involved with creating the specs at Freedesktop.org. Hell, I'm a KDE developer, and I'm also in the CVS commit list on the freedesktop server. The reason that you haven't seen Freedesktop standard support in KDE yet is because either A) You haven't tried a KDE 3.2 beta or B) You're obviously trolling.
KDE 3.2 will have support for all of the relevant standards that have moved out of the 'still in progress' stage and even some support for a few that haven't yet been finalized. KDE 3.1 was released almost a full year ago, when none of these standards was really done yet, so it isn't exactly a crime that it didn't support standards that didn't exist.
And KDE 3.3 will support even more of the specs that Freedesktop puts out, because we're involved in their creation (things that are currently pre-spec, even, like the shared MIME and Help systems).
FWIW, even though I don't work on GNOME (and I have worked on KConfig and KControl, so I have some idea what I'm talking about in that area at least), GConf is really nothing like the Windows registry. The fact that the GConf editor _looks_ somewhat similar to Regedit is really bad for the GNOME guys because it gives the wrong impression (IMHO), but the underlying system is really absolutely nothing like the evil that is the Windows Registry.
:) KDE 3.2 is a pretty big step towards it, but it's not done yet, and there will be much more work to clean things up for KDE 3.3, and KDE4 will likely feature a very different configuration application altogether.
And as far as KControl goes... trust me, work is being done to clean up the mess.
But KDE 3.3 is at least a year away, and KDE4 is (to quote Havoc Pennington) something for the Star-Trek future.