Qt Accessibility

Current State

Accessibility was added to Qt widgets in Qt 4 (or before depending on your definition). It needs a bridge to get Qt talking to the relevant accessibility framework for the platform being used. Windows and Mac Carbon have native accessibility frameworks and Qt talks to these. On Linux the most used accessibility framework is AT-SPI. However this needs a CORBA implementation which Qt does not have (and nobody wants) so support for AT-SPI was never added. A DBus implementation, AT-SPI2, is now becoming available and is due to be the default in Ubuntu in future releases (and possibly natty).

Current Work

Accessibility on Linux seems to be a low priority for Nokia who are more interested in mobile phones.

A Qt bridge for AT-SPI2 was worked on until late 2009 (https://labs.codethink.co.uk/index.php/p/qt-atspi2/). AT-SPI2 being a new technology though it's interfaces have changed and notable work is needed to port it to the final AT-SPI2.

There is at least one employee within Nokia Qt who is interested in working on the AT-SPI2 support but this would probably need him to get work time allocated.

Recommendation

Canonical could task or contract someone to implement AT-SPI2 support for Qt. This would probably be several weeks to months work.

Continuing to remind Nokia Qt that this is a blocker to using Qt within Ubuntu might help get staff time allocated.

Caveat

Accessibility is much more than widgets. Notably QGraphicsView and Qt Quick have their own "widgets" which do not have accessibility support. This would need to be added for Unity 2D to support accessibility (as is currently happening with the original Unity).

Other facets of accessibility include the ability to scale fonts, use different colour schemes and monochrome icons, follow mouse with magnifiers and other tools and screen readers. All of these are supported by KDE.

References

Useful blog summary from last year http://www.jpwhiting.blogspot.com/2010/02/state-of-free-accessibility.html

Jonathan Riddell 2011-01-20