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Re: [orca-list] Qt 5 accessibility

Hi,

thanks a lot for the bug reports, with those I can work.
With all this effort it sounds like Qt Linux accessibility will benefit from the 
next big round of polishing.
Please keep in mind that it was almost unusable before and now we are 
concerned with things such as spin boxes not reading their values. For me this 
is a big victory and as said previously completely depends on you giving me 
feedback. I simply don't have enough experience using a screen reader. While 
I'd like to spend more time trying to use my computer with the screen turned 
off I simply lack the time, that's why I ask you to help me find the issues.

I responded to Peter's bugs on the bug tracker and will tackle them as I find 
the time. Thanks for filing them, they are all sensible and helpful to me.

I currently don't know of a way to have Qt not use gtk style, except for 
removing the style plugin (simply moving it out of the directory would work).
The plugin should be called libqgtk2.so and on Ubuntu it is in 
/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/qt5/plugins/platformthemes
It's also possible to rename the complete platformthemes directory in which 
case you'll also lose the menu integration so that menus are a normal part of 
the window. That still doesn't help to show the menu when the ALT key is 
occupied otherwise.

Greetings,
Frederik

On Wednesday, June 04, 2014 12:23:59 PM Peter Vágner wrote:

Hello,
I have filled several bugs on the QT bugtracker and I am posting here
just for possible tryaging and further discussion.
I apologize testing with transmission-qt instead of testing with some
simple example. This is the only QT5 app which is open-source and is
distributed easily enough to just run and test.


Caret events not anounced by orca on linux when moving using arrow keys
inside edit fields
https://bugreports.qt-project.org/browse/QTBUG-39439

I have tested with edit field on the transmission-qt main window.
0) make sure both orca and transmission-qt are running.
1) tab until you hear text to know the edit field has gained the focus.
2) type in some text.
3) use left and right arrow keys to navigate over the text you have just
entered. As the cursor moves orca should announce the letter where the
cursor is pointing to.


The fact an item in the list has been unselected is not reported with
orca on linux
https://bugreports.qt-project.org/browse/QTBUG-39440

I've tested with the list on the transmission-qt main window on linux
with orca 3.13 pre.
0) make sure both orca and transmission-qt are running.
1) Add at least two torrents so there is something to select.
2) repeatedly press the tab key to focus an item in the list.
3) Press ctrl+a to select all the items in the list.
4) Press and hold down the ctrl key.
5) While the ctrl key is held pressed down use up and down arrow to move
in the list.
6) Now press the space bar to deselect currently highlighted item.
Result: thereis no audible event informing user that the selection has
been changed. When comparing the behaviour with gtk lists and tables
orca should say not selected in this situation.


With orca on linux there are issues while reading message dialogs
https://bugreports.qt-project.org/browse/QTBUG-39441

I have tested with transmission-qt QT 5.3 and orca 3.13 pre.
0) make sure both orca and transmission-qt are running.
1) add at least 1 torrent so there is something to act on.
2) focuss the list.
3) press the applications key to open the context menu.
4) Press down arrow several times until you hear remove.
5) activate remove item by pressing the enter key.
6) Notice the prompt of the dialog is not spoken. Sometimes I can hear
it once after pressing the tab key and notice you are unable to hear
that prompt again even when trying to use so called flat review to
review the screen.
Flat review sometimes works but I am unable to predict when and where.


Inconsistent behaviour with spin boxes on linux with orca
https://bugreports.qt-project.org/browse/QTBUG-39442

0) make sure both orca and transmission-qt are running.
1) Open the menubar and navigate to the Edit -> Preferences.
2) In the preferences window tab around until you focus a spin box.
Usually these contain a numeric value which can also be edited directly.
Pressing left and right arrow keys to read current value letter by
letter is working like it should however when pressing up and down arow
to increment or decrement the value the first change is reported
correctly and subsequent changes are not. Either the label associated
with the control is reported on each value change or the focus is moved
to a different control as I am testing this with transmission-qt.


Orca flat review on linux is not restricted to the current window
https://bugreports.qt-project.org/browse/QTBUG-39444

I am not sure this is a real issue or it's imposed by the QT gui
paradigm. I even have no steps to reproduce here.
On linux the major screen reader for graphical desktop orca has a
feature called flat review. It allows reviewing screen content in a 2D
representation. It allows blind individuals to browse the text shown on
the screen by lines, words and even by characters.
With GTK apps while using flat review the content is usually restricted
to the currently showing window or child window.
With QT apps this is not currently honoured. While using flat review
inside a dialog window the flat review contains content from the parent
windows from the same application.
Is this a good candidate for a feature request?


List item position and count calculation depends on visible area at
least on linux
https://bugreports.qt-project.org/browse/QTBUG-39448

I have tested with orca 3.13 pre and transmission-qt with QT 5.3.0
0) make sure both orca and transmission-qt are running.
1) Add more torrents to the list than your screen size allow viewing
without scrolling for example I do have 11 torrents.
2) tab around in order to focus the list on the main window, press down
arrow and then home to make sure the first item gets selected.
3) Now use the where am I feature of orca to retrieve curent list
position as well as number of items by pressing numpad plus.
4) Examine the output. For example I am getting "list item <name> 1 of
7" while the first item is selected. "2 of 7" for the second item, "7 of
7" when the 7th item is selected, ", "7 of 8" when 8, 9 and 10 item is
selected and "7 of 7" for the last item. I suspect this is not handling
the real item indexes but indexes of the items currently visible on the
screen.

Greetings

Peter

On 04.06.2014 09:35, Peter Vágner wrote:

Hello,
I have already started writing some of the issues in my drafts however
running qt apps with -style=fusion made such a difference that I
should at least post a quick update on how I currently see it.
When the GTK style is used I have issues navigating to child windows
for example with transmission-qt I can't focus the settings window.
Another issue with GTK style is that there is no obvious way on how to
bring up the menu bar. The alt key alone can't be used to popup the
menubar, F10 or shift+F10 do nothing in this case as well and the menu
can't be reached via the gnome top pannel like it's working with GTK3
apps. So the only workaround which has left is using mnemonics to pull
specific menus e.g. pressing alt+f for going directly to the file
menu. This works even while GTK style is loaded.
Other issues remain regardless of the style being used.
Previously I have said I do have issues with sliders. I must have
mixed the role names because now after checking again I noticed
sliders are working fine but I am having problems getting corect value
reporting for spin boxes. Usually these contain a numeric value which
can also be edited directly. Pressing left and right arrow keys to
read current value letter by letter is working like it should however
when pressing up and down arow to increment or decrement the value the
first change is reported correctly and subsequent changes are not.
Either the label associated with the control is reported on each value
change or the focus is moved to a different control as I am testing
this with transmission-qt.
Comboboxes appear to be fixed for the next update according to the bug
report you have mentioned.
Edit fields can't be confortably navigated no mather which style is
loaded.
I'll now finally look into the bugtracker and I'll try to submit these
as individual issues.

Is there a way to force a specific style system wide? For me and maybe
others this would be a nice tweak since we don't normally care on
appearance and prefer easy access to the menubar instead.

Greetings

Peter

 On 03.06.2014 16:21, Frederik Gladhorn wrote:

Hi Peter and all,

On Monday, June 02, 2014 05:00:00 PM Peter Vágner wrote:

Hello,
I am sorry my attempt at some kind of report was not something you
would
consider as a polite request. Anyway is there a way for you or someone
else close enough on the team to at least do some verry basic testing
with the real screen reader orca on linux in this specific case please?


I do this regularly and one issue just came up which was completely
unexpected
to me. I run KDE usually and thus get one of the Qt default styles.
But of
course most Orca users use Gnome and Qt tries to adapt and be visually
pleasing and thus loads the GTK style which integrates nicely but
fares much
worse when it comes to a11y. I haven't thought about this being an issue
before and I guess we were experiencing completely different behavior.

As a quick test, can you run the application on the command line with "-
style=fusion" as parameter? For me that makes a huge difference, as
in Orca
barely working and working nicely.

I'm currently on the road, so I'll not get around to looking at this
properly
for the next few days.
https://bugreports.qt-project.org/browse/QTBUG-39419


Also would you like me to write reports in a way so you will get steps
to reproduce, current behaviour and expected behaviour? This is
something I believe I can do and if it may eventually help to make QT
accessibility become even better in the future, then I am happy to
do that.


That would be really great. Usually the issues are pretty obvious
(even though
you'll have to bear with me, I'm still learning all the time), so a
short
description of what doesn't work and how it should be is indeed the
right
thing. Please be sure to use GUI: Accessibility as Component, then it
ends up
being assigned directly to me and I'll deal with it.


I haven't tested QT5 on windows so I can't comment on this right now
but
I can remember having issues for example with tabcontrols on all the
platforms in the past so I've assumed most of these critical issues
target multiplatforms where possible.


We radically reworked many parts and moved away from some of the old
MSAA
APIs, of course it depends on the screen reader used, but I usually
check at
least with NVDA and it seems to me that Tabs work. Please let me know
if they
don't. As said, I usually check that screen readers read the items
(such as
each tab name) and that it works with keyboard. I may very well get
details
wrong and sometimes Qt behaves slightly different from GTK.

Greetings,
Frederik


Thanks and greetings

Peter

On 02.06.2014 13:57, Frederik Gladhorn wrote:

Hi,

Peter, thanks for your feedback. In the last three months we closed 44
accessibility issues in Qt, of course not all of them will end up in a
release right away. Also I personally worked on a lot of Mac and
Windows
issues since I got high quality bug reports on these platforms.

This is the first time I get any feedback when it comes to
accessibility
on
Linux with Qt 5.3, so I am not surprised that there are issues.
Please let
me know when you run into problems.

On Friday, May 30, 2014 12:00:26 PM Peter Vágner wrote:

Hello,
I have briefly tested transmission-qt with QT 5.3 on arch linux
today.
I am not happy to report that:
- comboboxes


I wonder if the problem you are seeing is this bug:
https://bugreports.qt-project.org/browse/QTBUG-36814
(fixed in 5.3.1)


, sliders appear to be still broken ei.e. not correctly
firing value change events.


Can you please give more details? I just tested a simple Qt example
that
ships with Qt (widgets/sliders) and for me sliders work (Orca
announces
the new value after pressing the arrow keys.
Funny enough sliders and dial don't do that.
https://bugreports.qt-project.org/browse/QTBUG-39394


I am having issues navigating in edit fields (note this appears to be
working better with QT4).


Please give more details. Ideally a bug report at
https://bugreports.qt-project.org (the account creation currently
has a
visual only captcha, sorry for that. Upgrading the bug tracker is
scheduled but non-trivial, but you can send a mail to
jira-admin qt-project org and will get an account).


Perhaps there are under the hoodstability and other fixes but I am
afraid real accessibility testing by the potential users is either
not
taken into considerations while working on this or it's being put
aside
for the consideration to the future updates.


We test as much as we can, but not depending on a screen reader it's
sometimes hard to tell what is working and what isn't. So please give
feedback, otherwise I cannot spend time on this.

Greetings,
Frederik


Other things which I can't say are QT5 issues or might be app
specific
issues is that flat review does not work and some of the controls
don't
convey its role and state.
I have studied no implementation details I have observed all this by
running orca and my guess work as I can't see at all.

I am looking forward to some real exciting developments on this
front.

Greetings

Peter

On 20.05.2014 15:35, Frederik Gladhorn wrote:

Hello,

since Qt accessibility comes up as a topic every once in a while, I
thought
I'd give a short update.

Qt 5 is looking better and better when it comes to accessibility.
Today
Qt
5.3.0 was released and the release contains quite some improvements
across
the board and on all platforms. I recently wrote a blog post
about it:
http://blog.qt.digia.com/blog/2014/05/14/accessibility-in-qt-5-3/

Since KDE is slowly moving towards a release based on Qt 5, I
hope that
we'll be able to provide a decent experience for everyone from the
release of Plasma Next and onwards. By the way, the old environment
variable to enable accessibility has been retired and Qt now
ships and
builds all accessibility code by default, not depending on external
plugins any more.

I'd also like to mention that we now have a dedicated mailing
list to
discuss Qt accessibility issues:
http://lists.qt-project.org/mailman/listinfo/accessibility

Another nice project that just started is a cooperation to improve
accessibility for Qt apps on mobile devices (targeting Android
and iOS).

Let me quote Trenton:

My name is Trenton Schulz. I’m a senior research scientist at the
Norwegian
Computing Center (Norsk Regnesentral), and I’m working with
Digia on
our
BestApps project [1] for increasing the accessibility of mobile
apps.

Currently, we are doing some user investigation about how different
people
use assistive technology (AT) with their smartphones and apps. In
connection with this, I would be interested in finding people that
would
be
interested in participating in a small interview (either over
telephone,
Skype, or email) about how they use this technology. We are
holding a
workshop connected to this as well on 19 June in Oslo.

So, if you are interested (or know anyone), please let me know via
email
and I can send more details. Your input can help make future Qt
applications more accessible and easier to use for everyone.


I'm looking forward to feedback from the Orca users as more Qt 5
applications become available on Linux.

Greetings,
Frederik

PS: Qt 4 is in maintenance mode and there will be no real changes in
accessibility for it.

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