[orca-list] Qt 5 accessibility

[Frederik Gladhorn <gladhorn kde org>]

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.