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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 a big step onward. Anyone know how this assistive technology compares with gnopernicus ? Or do the separate softwares need to be made due to differences between Gnome & KDE?
How does this make KDE any more useful to us , who don't really need accessibility.
I'm sure you can find a use for screen magnification, improved typing commands, and keyboard-mouse-control.
So it is more useful--about as "more useful" as that handicapped ramp you never appreciated until you have to roll a heavy desk up it.
Making KDE more accessible to physically handicapped people is sure nice and appriciable, but shouldn't it come down the list of things like
No. You can use KDE as-is. Others cannot use it without handicapped accessability at all.
'sides which, this is OSS "scratch an itch" software.
So, if I am a partially deaf or blind kernel developer, why should I have to wait for fucntionaility everyone else already has?
It's easy to discount stuff that doesn't immediately apply, but this is only a good thing for lots of people.
I agree that UI consistency is something that needs work, but thinking about how *everyone* uses KDE can only help the UI design.
Its also another example of the KDE side having to wrap GNOME C APIs because the technology transfer is going GNOME -> KDE rather than the other way around. In this case, its perfectly fine (since ATK is superior to anything KDE had), but hopefully, a lot of the superior technology of KDE will make it into GNOME. My biggest fear is that the fact that GNOME is C and C is easier to wrap will make GNOME technologies more prevalent in standards even when the KDE versions are greatly superior.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
I've been reading this for months, people saying that 'distro X has KDE as the default desktop' or 'distro Y uses Gnome by default'.
EVERY distro I've installed over the last 3 years *asks* me which desktop managers I want to install. Although this decision is generally put on par with choosing whether you want to install 'games' or 'server software' or 'scientific' software, it's still a decision you're expected to make. I don't think any distro I've ever installed just puts a desktop on by default with no choice (save for Knoppix).
What have I missed in these wars where certain distros make the choice for you? I've installed mandrake, redhat, suse, plain debian, knoppix and and caldera over the years.
creation science book
Then don't do it. Noone forces you to change everything, the defaults of KDE are at least as sensible as the ones of Gnome (although with a different focus)
Don't think of it as a flame---it's more like an argument that does 3d6 fire damage
Distributions can modify KDE as they want (the *modular* control center comes in handy here =P ) so it isn't overwhelming for newbies.
It's easy to choose defaults and hide functionality for newbies.
That said most newbies I know are more comfortable with KDE than with Gnome because KDE with its default settings is similar to Windows in look and feel.
Don't think of it as a flame---it's more like an argument that does 3d6 fire damage
I currently use Blackbox because it's more lightweight than either KDE or Gnome, it loads almost instantly. It can run GTK+ or QT apps just fine, too. So what are these "desktop environments" doing that takes so much resources? (honestly!)
There are many other settings where making something accessible also makes it easier to use for the rest of us:
It's really just about being user-friendly, making your edge cases disappear.
sigs, as if you care.
Actually, ATK was developed by Sun and depends mainly on glib, which I find overexagreated to name a "Gnome technology".
In that case, it makes sense to use the Sun, hum, Gnome technology because it is mature supported in major applications (Gnome, OpenOffice, Mozilla and Java) and is adapted to the task.
However, the technologies also fly in the other way. D-BUS is modeled after KDE's dcop. And if you see the discussion on freedesktop, you will see a lot of technical contribution from KDE hackers. So, it is hard to map a KDE technology directly into Gnome, usually because of languages and depandancies issues (Qt or glib ?).
I'm glad they have this accessibility thing but unless they do some usability efforts people like me will go for the unKluttered look of Gnome.
"eople with special needs have to pay more, because special needs cost more."
Except that disabilities often make it hard for them to pay at all. Think of it as an investment instead. If you make something accessible to the disabled it means they can contribute more to society and you won't be paying their unemployment instead. It means they'll be productive and more importantly happier and more empowered.
A lot of disabled access tools are also the same tools people that you often don't think of as disabled need - older people tend to lose their ability to focus well and benefit from maginfiers and chunky displays. People with arthtritis benefit from some of the other control features and so on.
And for the totally selfish: Its always worth remembering that by the time you are 70 you too will probably have poor eyesight, poor mobility and poor motion control.
Because accessibility tools exist there are a lot of productive people out there, including people writing Linux kernel code that most of the world doesn't even know are blind or otherwise disabled.
It's a very funny argument, that KDE looks too similar to Windows but doesn't act enough like it.
And really, Keramik looks nothing like any other graphical style I've ever seen. (Personally, I think that's probably good, as I can't stand the Keramik look myself, but to each his own). Using my Asteroid style, things look so Windows-like that it's frightening, but even the KDE2 default was designed to look more like BeOS than anything else, and KDE1 was designed and implemented by people who had more experience with OS/2 than with Windows.
So we've never really been into the whole "emulating Windows" thing except for places where it does make sense. The fact that our architecture is flexible enough to make things extremely Windows-like is a good thing, I think, because it also means that it's very easy to make things very unlike Windows.