Demo of Accessibility with KDE4

Speaker: Gunnar Schmidt

Often people with disabilities are excluded from the participation in the benefits of today's technology. Though it may be unintentional, this exclusion is far too common as the needs of persons with disabilities are rarely considered appropriately in the design process. However, it has also been demonstrated that technology can improve the lives of persons with disabilities.

The effort of finding solutions for persons with disabilities is called accessibility. The technologies developed for coping with certain disabilities are called assistive technologies. In order to work the most sophisticated assistive technologies need to talk to the usual applications. A screen reader, for example, needs to know the text of the currently focussed button in order to read it, a screen magnifier needs to know the coordinates of the button in order to decide which part of the screen needs to be magnified.

Currently there are communications protocols available for Windows, MacOS and Gnome. Unfortunately, there are technical problems that prevent the use of the CORBA based AT-SPI protocol (which currently is used with GNOME) for KDE, but Trolltech is currently implementing a DBUS-based protocol for the communication between Qt 4.3 based applications and assistive technologies.

This talk will demonstrate the current state of accessibility with KDE 4 in combination with assistive technologies. Depending on how many assistive technologies are ported to the new communication protocol, it may also include some demonstration of GNOME applications in combination with AT-SPI based assistive technologies.

Gunnar Schmidt

Biographical information will be added soon.