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?"

Comments

This may prove useful to ordinary people as well

[sufehmi]

For example, Windows' accessibility features has saved me many times when the mouse just doesn't want to work for various reason. It enable me to use the numpad to simulate the mouse, and troubleshoot the problem - instead of reinstalling it.

I welcome this addition to KDE even more for that reason.

Without intention to TROLL..

[frodo from middle ea]

What percent of windows users use the accessibility features ?

How does this make KDE any more useful to us , who don't really need accessibility. Making KDE more accessible to physically handicapped people is sure nice and appriciable, but shouldn't it come down the list of things like

consistent UI look and feel.
Better interoperability with non KDE applications
etc etc etc...

Not Relevent

[brunes69]

XSettings and the Desktop Color Scheme specs only refers to things like mouse curosr movement, drag and drop timeouts, and color schemes, trivial things of that nature. None of the more advanced types of configuration, like positions of panels, menu types, etc, are included in there.

All it is is a standard spec for controlling how happs behave in a fundamental fashion.

KDE and Gnome are so different and have such totally different config architectures (GConf vs. KConfig ) that you'll never be able to manage both with one single spec, unless either one desktop ditches their system and adopts the other (not going to happen ), or someone makes a huge monolithic app that can do both ( would be hideous ).

Re:Not Relevent

[nutshell42]

Yeah, Gconf is *so* superior. I always miss the registry when I'm away from Windows, too.

SCNR, really =), cleaning up kcontrol would be a *very good* idea I'm not arguing with you here. I'd really like to see simple and advanced profiles with all the stuff of the Gnome control center plus some essentials (language selection for example) as standard and a seperate section/a big red button for people who want all the settings.

That said one thing I'd like Gnome to reverse is the decision to abolish the apply/ok button in the settings. That's outright dangerous imho.

From a user: Thank you!

[Anonymous Coward]

I lost most of the use of my fingers and 40 percent of my vision in a chemical accident 15 years ago. I am so glad to see linux taking steps to make things more usable for people like me. I truly feel linux will soon take the lead in accessibility (not to mention stability and performance) from Microsoft very soon. Thank you linux hackers!

--Berry

Missleading announcement

[Anonymous Coward]

The announcement is quite missleading, the integration with ATK will eventually happen, but that does not mean that applications are accessible.

The Gnome folks went through at least a year adding accessibility to every dialog box in their applications.

Re:Major inroads need to be make

[asobala]

If you actually use Window's accessibility features, you will find them sadly lacking. Actually trying to navigate the desktop just using ATs is very difficult, lots of apps take no notice of the system settings, etc.

I am not an accessibility expert, but there have been some studies to suggest ATK is ahead of Windows here.