Developers behind the next version of KDE are trying to make their software more accessible to people with disabilities. More coverage from aKademy here and here.
Open-source developers focus on accessibility
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Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSAlert.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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Glad to KDE bring themselves up to date with GNOME in this area finally. Thanks to it’s more professional and corporate focus GNOME had this awhile ago.
Once KDE has this, it has a better chance being able to be adopted by some government entities, contractors or certain companies.
Tomorrow, you suddenly have a car accident and you become permanently disabled. Perhaps then will you realize why accessibility is important.
Because most things concerning accessibilities doesn’t only help disabled people, but things like better keyboard navigation (e.g. type-ahead-find in mozilla and konqueror) also helps many advanced users.
On another note, making _websites_ accessible is neither only for handicapped people, but it has even more advantages since it helps to reduce download times, improves support for text-only browsers, PDAs, mobiles, …
Is Gnome desktop really acessible, or is this another marketing slogan? I am not trolling, I really want to know.
Do GNOME apps have to cooperate or the framework does most of the job? Are the apps already adapted? What parts are still missing? Can I recomend Gnome already instead of windows?
Thanks.
Glad to KDE bring themselves up to date with GNOME in this area finally. Thanks to it’s more professional and corporate focus GNOME had this awhile ago.
Blah, blah, blah, corporate bollocks.
Once KDE has this, it has a better chance being able to be adopted by some government entities, contractors or certain companies.
An accessibility framework, and support for it, is a nice addition once you have everything else in place, but you cannot sell it to companies and governments per se. That’s just the way it is unfortunately. I don’t see Windows’ poor accessibility support being detrimental to it in companies or governments.
It is certainly something to be worked towards, but the notion that it makes a platform attractive to companies, governments etc. is way wide of the mark.
Quoting…
And survival of the fittest belongs with nazism. We are a little more intellegent then our monkey (or other animal) betheren.
A tad bit off topic, but survival of the fittest has been adopted by many cultures for along time, including the capitialist nature of the United States. I personally am much more intelligent than a monkey, I could probably say the same about you.
I personally don’t think the Linux Desktop is usable for even non handicap users right off of Windows XP, but it should reach a level of userbility equal to Windows XP in a couple years.
Although I’ve never used GNOME’s accesibility features (never needed them), technically speaking GNOME is really accessible. Sun put a lot of money and work into ATK, the accessbility toolkit. GTK is integrated with ATK. I believe there already are screenreaders available for GNOME. There are high contrast themes for the visually impared.
“Can I recomend Gnome already instead of windows?”
As with everything, that depends entirely on the person. To some people, yes. To others, no. To me, it’s been ready since 1.2.
The majority of the http://conference2004.kde.org/sched-devconf.php Contributor and Developer Conference presentations are available as Ogg Vorbis audio downloads or as Ogg Theora videos. If you want to know more on accessibility on the *nix desktops, go to http://ktown.kde.org/akademy/ presentation archives and grab the appropriate files. You can use https://player.helixcommunity.org/2004/unix/ HelixPlayer 1.0 on Linux and I have verified that the <a http://www.videolan.org/vlc/ VideoLAN client will play the videos on Windows. IF you intend to try and view the videos using the Windows Media Player, you will first need the DirectShow filters for Ogg Theora.
“Although I’ve never used GNOME’s accesibility features (never needed them), technically speaking GNOME is really accessible.”
I really wanted to know someone who tried this.
“Sun put a lot of money and work into ATK, the accessbility toolkit. GTK is integrated with ATK.”
Isn’t Qt already integrated with ATK as well? So what is the difference? (I really don’t know, I am not argumenting)
“As with everything, that depends entirely on the person. To some people, yes. To others, no. To me, it’s been ready since 1.2.”
I mean for people with disabilities, not to you and me. I am already a linux user
The question about “are we really accessible” has been nicely answered by the first talk by Aaron Leventhal (IBM accessibility expert, you can watch his presentation on the aKademy page). According to his opinion, Linux-Desktops are over three years behind Windows.
KDE is very accessible for people with physical disabilities (KMouseTool, KMouth), whereas GNOME is better accessible for blind people (Gnopernicus).
No one of the present 8 blind persons was able to successfully use GNOME, Mozilla or OpenOffice, though, they are still using the command line (lynx and mutt).
Both desktops are well accessible by low-vision people since fonts and colors are highly configurable and both desktop feature magnification tools.
The situation for people with motoric disabilities is also pretty OK since features like “sticky keys” are actually built into X and both desktops feature a convenient configuration frontend.
There is still a long long way to go before we can call any of the desktops “accessible”.
> By Harald Fernengel (IP: —.akademy.kde.org)
Nice domain name that you got there.
if I got into a car accident, ending up with low vision or one arm…there is not a single chance I want to spend any time behind a computer screen.
Thanks for your answers, I think they answer most of the questions. Can you answer some more?
About ATK support: what’s the difference between the toolkits?
I am happy to see all the camps working together. But if they are so close in support, what are the basis for the GNOME camp “I am acessible you are not” hype? The GNOME camp should be ahead on something to claim this…
“what are the basis for the GNOME camp “I am acessible you are not” hype?”
There is no such hype.
ATK is just a set of interfaces to make GTK widgets easily accessible. Qt 4 offers a bridge to ATK that implements all the interfaces, so Qt/KDE applications behave just like GNOME applications in a screen reader. This was what I demonstrated during my talk at aKademy (also online).
Furthermore, we discussed switching to D-BUS, so we can be compatible on the communication layer as opposed to the API layer. The advantage is that binary incompatible changes in the API (adding new widgets, for example) won’t affect the communication protocol, giving us more flexibility. KDE assistive technologies will be able to see/control GNOME apps and vice versa.
> what are the basis for the GNOME camp “I am acessible you are not” hype? The GNOME camp should be ahead on something to claim this…
As a KDE Accessibility developer, I am very impressed with the GNOME On-screen Keyboard GOK and with Dasher. They have features that you do not find anywhere else, and especially GOK is way ahead of any on-screen keyboard on other platforms. But these two applications alone are not enough to call a desktop truly accessible.
One thing that was very obvious at the forum is that KDE and GNOME currently have different solutions for different disabilities, that we still have a lot of work to do, and that we can only cover all users by closely cooperating and working hard.
The GNOME developers have said that they will steal some of the ideas we presented at the forum, and have encouraged us to do the same. Flamewars are really not important to us as accessibility developers. There are far too many real problems to be solved for a lot of disabled users.
Well said!
But I thought that gnome (because of sun) is accesible by some gouverment standard that allows it to be used in gouverment working places.
A few years ago, I was involved with the donation of some computer kit to a disabled charity. Most of the users were registered blind but the software they used made the text screens visible to those who were partially sighted. One guy could only read the screen when it was at least 60pt type and he had to put his one good eye at most one inch from the screen. Their determination to become proficient computer users really amazed me. One was an 80wpm touch typist.
So any help we can give to the less able parts of out society in fine by me. Where would Stephen Hawking be without some pretty specialised kit… Those who have all four limbs working perfectly, 20/20 vision and perfect hearing are the lucky few and that does not include me.
> But I thought that gnome (because of sun) is
> accesible by some gouverment standard that allows
> it to be used in gouverment working places.
From what I understand and from what I heard at various talks these “standards” basically just say that software should be accessible. AFAIK there are no real “hard” requirements for this to happen.
I am responsible for a small governmental website in Austria, Europe (http://www.dsk.gv.at/), and I routinely work with disabled users. As a govermental site, we must be accessible (http://www.dsk.gv.at/waie.htm), and we do our best to be available for all citizens.
Disable people should be a high priority for the OSS movement, because these are loyal customers who often get a bad service from the conventional software industry. The disabled need good software, and once you have won them, they stay with you.
Another thing: The “bots” used by search engines are very much like blind people in the way they “see” websites. As a rule of thumb, anything that causes trouble for blind users causes trouble for bots as well – flash, javascript navigation, buttons without the ALT-Attribute, trashy CMS and tables. If you want to know why Googlebot doesn’t like your site, call your local school for the blind and have a few blind ten year olds check it out.
[ Good to see Austrian governmental sites caring about accessibility. ]
> As a rule of thumb, anything that causes trouble for blind users causes trouble for bots as well
As well as for PDAs, text-mode browsers, mobiles, …
> – flash, javascript navigation, buttons without the ALT-Attribute, trashy CMS and tables.
…, frames (my personal hatred), presentational markup, “background sound”, background images, java applets
Anybody sane still using this? But some people will sadly never learn that websites are meant to convey _information_.
You have to see how this blind guy codes in Visual Studio at Microsoft.
http://channel9.msdn.com/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=17098
You can’t sell software to the government without accessibility functions.
http://80.48.65.2/black.jpeg
Hmmm…are you sure you did your homework before saying Windows has “poor accessibility support”? I have a deaf coworker and a visually-impaired aunt who have both benefited from various tools in the accessibility panels of different versions of windows over the past decade or so.
Here’s a page dedicated to awards related to accesibility and accomodation of disabilities MS and Windows have won over the years (some social, some technical):
http://www.microsoft.com/enable/microsoft/awards.aspx
(includes a Windows award for 12 years of accesibility-conscious design)
You may not think a Linux desktop will win any major corporate inroads by simply adding accesibility features, but trust me, it’s part of every commercial OS’s usability story–which is, I’m sure, why SUN helped out so much with ATK. Put it this way, OSHA and the ADA in the US (and many other laws in many other countries) will _require_ accessibility features for certain jobs, so it needs to get in there eventually.