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For software that is cross platform and accessible, forget about Qt

blind.guru

1–10 of 86 posts

Re: For software that is cross platform and accessible, forget about Qt

#4
So, to recap, GTK doesn't work at all for accessibility, wxWidgets has issues with text entry, and Qt works, but only with NVDA, and not with text entry fields and JAWS.

Now, Qt is an open project, so the question is: are there just no users interested in this who could implement it themselves? Most other functionality in toolkits was implemented like this.

Re: For software that is cross platform and accessible, forget about Qt

#5
> The JAWS people didn't answer emails when we reached out to them (admittedly quite a while ago), so we've been focusing on NVDA support. Patches to improve the situation with JAWS are welcome. Note that we may eventually implement UIA as opposed to IAccessible2, but that work is currently going slow.

Re: For software that is cross platform and accessible, forget about Qt

#7
post #4

So, to recap, GTK doesn't work at all for accessibility, wxWidgets has issues with text entry, and Qt works, but only with NVDA, and not with text entry fields and JAWS. Now, Qt is an open project, so the question is: are there just no users interested in this who could implement it themselves? Most other functionality in toolkits was implemented like this.

Maybe because it's easier to solve the immediate problem by writing the UI in the target platform's native fully-accessible toolkit and dropping support for platforms that don't have one.

That said, I suspect the easiest solution nowadays would be writing your UI in electron, or the Gecko-based project that was announced a week or so ago (sorry, I can't remember the name).

Re: For software that is cross platform and accessible, forget about Qt

#8
post #7
post #4

So, to recap, GTK doesn't work at all for accessibility, wxWidgets has issues with text entry, and Qt works, but only with NVDA, and not with text entry fields and JAWS. Now, Qt is an open project, so the question is: are there just no users interested in this who could implement it themselves? Most other functionality in toolkits was implemented like this.

Maybe because it's easier to solve the immediate problem by writing the UI in the target platform's native fully-accessible toolkit and dropping support for platforms that don't have one. That said, I suspect the easiest solution nowadays would be writing your UI in electron, or the Gecko-based project that was announced a week or so ago (sorry, I can't remember the name).

Are they accessible? I know a lot of web toolkits and component libraries are not.

Re: For software that is cross platform and accessible, forget about Qt

#10
post #4

So, to recap, GTK doesn't work at all for accessibility, wxWidgets has issues with text entry, and Qt works, but only with NVDA, and not with text entry fields and JAWS. Now, Qt is an open project, so the question is: are there just no users interested in this who could implement it themselves? Most other functionality in toolkits was implemented like this.

These are the things that are super low priority for commercial projects, and those don't usually want to leave money on the table. They're super low priority for OSS.

If I recall correctly Sun paid a long time ago for usability and accessibility studies for GTK 2 and Gnome 2. And I'd guess most of their work was thrown way during the transition to GTK 3/Gnome 3 (somebody can correct me on this, I'm not really certain). Basically: https://www.jwz.org/doc/cadt.html

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