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

blind.guru

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

#51

Post by SyneRyder »

dvdgsng wrote: post #47
falcolas wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

QT promised something it couldn't (wouldn't?) deliver upon. Given that the author explicitly wrote them with questions about it and was effectively lied to, his ire is both understandable and justified IMO. What more should we expect of him?

Did they promise JAWS support?

The article claims they did, but the author uses a paraphrase instead of a direct quote. From the article:

"No problem. Qt works on Linux, Mac and Windows, and if you find any problems, just report them to us and we are going to fix them."

However without a direct quote, it's hard to tell if that's an accurate representation or not.

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

#52

Post by imtringued »

kuschku wrote: 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.

The only users that are interested and can implement it themselves already use linux where accessibility works better than on windows or with JAWS.

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

#53

Post by falcolas »

dvdgsng wrote: post #47
falcolas wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

QT promised something it couldn't (wouldn't?) deliver upon. Given that the author explicitly wrote them with questions about it and was effectively lied to, his ire is both understandable and justified IMO. What more should we expect of him?

Did they promise JAWS support?

They don't mention any screen readers; their documentation only calls out backend accessibility specs without any mention of popular specs (UIA) they don't support.

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

#54

Post by yoz-y »

ktta wrote: post #41
distances wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, it's checking the referrer. Cookies can't of course be read by other sites, that would break everything.

I wasn't thinking about the cookies part. I just learnt about Referer. How doesn't this compromise privacy? Looks like I'm woefully uninformed about web security/privacy. Also, found this[1] for anyone who just learnt about this like me. For firefox, go to about:config and set Network.http.sendRefererHeader to 0 [1]: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/referer-control/hn...

Not sending a referer can sometimes break sites though. For example some image hosting sites will not display content if you are not coming from their domain (to avoid hotlinking) and some web-apps will kill deep linking like this.

Granted it is not very secure but some people will go to great lengths to break the open web.

This is also how Google Analytics knows where people come to your site from, for example.

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

#55

Post by falcolas »

whyever wrote: post #50
falcolas wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By not marketing their software as accessible; by not telling the author in an explicit email that they would solve any accessibility issues he found? If they had been clear up front about their accessibility support, I doubt this would have been an issue in the first place.

It is accessible, just not with some specific software. From what I can see, they tried to solve it, but could not due to lack of cooperation by the software's creator. Maybe they should have spent more effort, but then this was not a paying customer apparently.

That specific software is the most popular software in use on Windows. That makes it something of a required use-case if you want to claim accessibility on Windows.

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

#56

Post by yoz-y »

MBCook wrote: post #40
kronos29296 wrote: post #29

Somehow the author assumes that the native gui has better accessibility features. In a world of bloated frameworks and browser as a gui type apps not every app is accessible. Most of the time it isn't even on their radar because of the tiny user base. One of those things that is just plain wrong when you spectate but when it is your job to do you find it a pain to implement.

Microsoft and Apple put a lot of time/effort into making sure their libraries provide the necessary support so people can write accessible software. Individual programs may be bad, but the toolkits support it. Here, none of the cross platform toolkits seem to even have the most basic support.

Sadly accessibility development has many roadblock on its path:

- For-profit organizations have little incentives to develop accessible software or they have to make it prohibitively expensive - Open Source development is usually "itch my scratch"-driven (as the author points out) and the pool of people who are both motivated by their own plight and able to develop solutions for them are very few.

I think this is the main reason why the best accessibility frameworks are made by companies that are already far away from their bottom line and can afford to do the work at their own expense.

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

#57

Post by BeetleB »

imtringued wrote: post #52
kuschku wrote: 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.

The only users that are interested and can implement it themselves already use linux where accessibility works better than on windows or with JAWS.

>The only users that are interested and can implement it themselves already use linux where accessibility works better than on windows or with JAWS.

Eh?

I worked with a blind programmer. He loves Linux, but had to stick to Windows because the accessibility for blind people on Linux was horrible compared to JAWS.

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

#58

Post by toyg »

bjpbakker wrote: post #16

This article isn't anything more than a rant. The author filed a bug in the QT issue tracker [1] that some proprietary screen reader (JAWS, that his customers use) does not work well with QT on Windows. No (technical) details provided whatsoever. I don't believe anyone in the QT team is /against/ stronger support for accessibility. IMO it is understandable that fixing some piece of proprietary software is not a top p…

I agree, especially if you look at the comment on the bug:

> "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."

That, to me, is a perfectly reasonable and polite response. "JAWS didn't care about us so we've worked with others. If you can help, you're more than welcome. Things might get better at some point anyway but it will take a while."

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

#59

Post by MBCook »

yoz-y wrote: post #56
MBCook wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microsoft and Apple put a lot of time/effort into making sure their libraries provide the necessary support so people can write accessible software. Individual programs may be bad, but the toolkits support it. Here, none of the cross platform toolkits seem to even have the most basic support.

Sadly accessibility development has many roadblock on its path: - For-profit organizations have little incentives to develop accessible software or they have to make it prohibitively expensive - Open Source development is usually "itch my scratch"-driven (as the author points out) and the pool of people who are both motivated by their own plight and able to develop solutions for them are very few. I think this is the…

Apple seems to do it because it's in their ethos. Jobs and Cooks have both said it matters to them. They aren't big in enterprise (or even education) so I don't think that argument fits. I think they just care. That may be a bit of my bias but I can't come up with a good business case for them.

MS may or may not care, but accessibility is often a requirement for government contracts (or buisnesses who want government contracts) so it's a good sales feature for them, even if something if a checkbox feature. They work very hard at t too.

But the end result is that both of them work really hard on accessibility and everyone benefits.

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

#60

Post by SparkyMcUnicorn »

falcolas wrote: post #43

So, I'll toss this question out there: Is Electron or React Native better in this regard? Making the assumption that JAWS is capable of reading into HTML in Chrome as a browser, I would expect that it's capable of the same in Electron. It sounds like, from this article, Java is a workable (if not well suited for a C++ driven backend). Of course, cross-platform shims aren't that hard, just time consuming.

Looks like Electron is just as capable as a website: https://electron.atom.io/docs/tutorial/accessibility/
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