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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?"
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?
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
"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.