[orca-list] Pleasantly surprised by the accessibility of Rockbox Utility

[Kyle <kyle4jesus gmail com>]

Now that I have qt-at-spi installed and working, I thought I would do 
some rather extensive testing of the Rockbox Utility, which installs 
Rockbox firmware on mp3 players, and also installs voice data to make 
some mp3 players talk.

A rather important note: the Rockbox Utility binary distribution at
http://www.rockbox.org/wiki/RockboxUtility
is presented by Orca as "inaccessible," probably because it wasn't built 
using QT 4.8, which appears to be the first version that supports 
qt-at-spi accessibility. Having said this, I was able to build the 
application from the source tree, and it works quite well. I was able to 
successfully install the .talk files for the files and folders on my mp3 
player with only a few issues, most of which are described in the 
Rockbox Utility wiki page at
http://www.rockbox.org/wiki/RockboxUtility#Known_accessibility_issues
The only issue I had that was not addressed by the wiki was a problem 
reading characters in a text box. Tabbing to the text box read the 
entire text in the box, but arrowing left/right was not speaking. On the 
other hand, I was quite pleasantly surprised by just how well it is 
working, even though the Rockbox devs likely hadn't yet considered 
accessibility specifically on Linux, because up until qt-atspi and 
at-spi2 over DBus, QT accessibility on Linux was a big fat zero. <smile> 
The best surprise for me was my ability to tab through the progress 
window as the .talk files were being created so that I was able to read 
any errors that occurred and also to know that the talk file generation 
was completed.

I just thought I'd share my experiences with one specific application I 
will likely be using now that I have at least some access to QT 
applications. In the middle of all the bug reports and things that still 
need to be worked out, especially for QT, as Linux+QT+Orca accessibility 
is quite new, I thought it would be a good idea to share the encouraging 
results I have had so far, and to take this oppertunity to say thank you 
to all the wonderful people who are working hard to make it all possible.
~Kyle