Akademy/2023/Accessibility BoF
Meeting Notes
Upstream Qt Fixes
- for generic stuff like ignoring invisible elements and propagating action names for icon-only buttons
- Carl has a WIP patch for the former
- set better defaults when A11y is enabled and not manually overwritten
- there's not fundamental objection from Qt to such changes, so we should try to do that first before doing app-level workarounds
- a11y attached properties incur extra cost
HTML strings in a11y names
- avoid when possible, screen readers struggle with that
- screen readers only see things that are focusable, not the entire AT-SPI tree
- this also means only actions but not labels are read out
- focus inside list items is also tricky
- Firefox uses a different kind of key navigation when the screen reader is on, which makes a lot more things available such as links inside a text body
- QWidget::buddy helps with this, but doesn't exist for QML
- could be done in QML by binding the label text to a11y name or description
- Kirigrami FormLayout and MobileForms cover some of that
- can we automatically test for this?
- every element in the tab order should have a name
- can we check for complete tab order graphs?
- text fields interrupt tab order
- should we set a dedicated shortcut for this?
- should tab entry be disabled so tab works focus changes?
- shift-tab works to tab out backwards
- row selection vs cell selection in widget list/table/tree views
- current (focus) highlighting is hardly visible compared to selection highlighting
- possible enable more keyboard navigation here when the screen reader is on
- QAccessible::isActive gives us API for checking that
Tooling
- there's fregl's "Randamizer" tool in libqaccessibilityclient, which is a very bare-bone version of accesserizer
- the web inspectors have this built in:
- AT-SPI tree access
- color contrast checks
- kwin color blindness effect: exists from Randa 2017 (?) but not integrated in Kwin upstream
- could we built a color contrast checks?
- do we need this for the style, or are custom colors the bigger problems?
- should we have a more expanded color palette/color API that gives you more colors which are optimized for contrast? Android apparently has something similar
Discoverability of A11y features
- zoom/color inversions etc listed under desktop effects
- have all this collected in a a11y systemsettings page
- have a11y covered in the Plasma welcome page?