Promote accessibility improvements and outreach to a11y
Open, Needs TriagePublic

Description

Two maintainers of screen reader software have arrived on Phabricator over the past few weeks with the goal of finally making Plasma usable for the blind and visually impaired.

We’re currently missing an opportunity to develop a relationship with a11y, a group that already has strong relations with the Linux Foundation and GNOME.

Here’s what Promo can do to seize the moment right now:

  • @chempfling asked to have a Dot post made about his efforts, so more people in KDE could know what’s going on and lend a hand.
  • Update the wiki to reflect current capabilities and to stop highlighting poorly maintained solutions. KWin’s Zoom effect vs. KZoom, for example.
  • Reciprocate the effort and get in touch with people like Orca’s Joan Marie Diggs to establish more open lines of communication and cooperation with a11y.

There has been some amazing progress, but they have been vocal about wanting to tap into the knowledge and assistance of the wider KDE community.

Embracing their efforts to reach out and contribute will help us fulfill the promise of KDE’s manifesto while becoming more attractive to enterprise and education clients who have a legal obligation to provide accessible solutions.

dcahal created this task.Nov 8 2018, 1:19 AM

Howdy,

We’re currently missing an opportunity to develop a relationship with a11y, a group that already has strong relations with the Linux
Foundation and GNOME.

I don't think we miss the opportunity to develop an relationship with the guys behind the linked page.
Its my page ;). its a small community of blind people what try to improve the situation (because it seems there is currently no official place like the FSF, Linux Foundation or "Open Accessibility Work Group" (all works seems to have stalled here) what changes things). I created OCRdesktop the SimpleOrcaPluginSystem and the the fenrir CLI screen reader with the help and feedback of those girls and guys :).
So i always get feedback from them and we have an very hot wire here :).
They are looking very close to our work and cant wait to get the first things workable in a way that they can test (and send feedback, code and requests).

There has been some amazing progress, but they have been vocal about wanting to tap into the knowledge and assistance of the
wider KDE community.
Embracing their efforts to reach out and contribute will help us fulfill the promise of KDE’s manifesto while becoming more attractive
to enterprise and education clients who have a legal obligation to provide accessible solutions.

I agree. Our current work is just the very basic stuff needed to use an desktop for blind people. Most biggest problem i see (in all areas of Plasma - i don't wanna rant here, without any emotion, just fact ) is Keyboard navigation and focus handling. This is not only related to the a11y project, since we should have an unique way to handle those things.

Examples:
ignoring the fact that tray area is not navigate able at all (already on todo list)

  • try to access an WiFi without your mouse
  • change sound sink witout your mouse
  • open the Volume plasmoid in the panel - try to increase the volume without mouse.
  • open "state and notification" area and try to select an entry (of course without mouse).

that's all stuff what should have a natural navigation behaviour. most of that stuff are natural lists. but re implemented 1000 times (it feels like). With different behave all the time.

an other example for focus handling:
I currently work to make "kickoff" application launcher accessible. but the highlighted elements in the starter never get the focus. its just faked (lol). in fact the search entry always has the focus. for visual guys this doesn't matter. a screen reader makes huge differences here. the focus is the the middle of every reporting. if the focus never changes, there is nothing to report.

We should pin this down somehow to an good Guideline or bring it in other ways to our folks.
Sadly me, as non native english speaker ( my english is not the best), i may not the best guy to create english texts :).

spoken for me (i m not blind) as ERP / Dynamics NAV / SAP developer, power user (windows 7 for my work sadly), i use my system without touching my mouse anytime. this is just not possible here yet. we need to go there.
What i want to say, this is not only related to accessibility but also to an professional/ fast workflow

long thing short:
so yea :), I m all in and agree with you. We need to bring this to the KDE community as well as the world (when we have made some more progress here ).
KDE / Plasma and this awesome community has created so many lovely and even powerful things and has even more potential to make awesome things even more awesome and professional.

just my 5 cents

cheers chrys

Here some update from the a11y side:

  • We just prepared an Accessibility section in our HIG (Human interface Guidelines), what are ready to land. Issue T11040

https://invent.kde.org/websites/hig-kde-org/merge_requests/22

  • I just brought up the idea to make accessibility as an main goal for 2019. See Issue T11074