Accessibility/Getting Started
Prerequisits
- Working at-spi 2 (D-Bus at-spi)
- Either build Qt 4.8 yourself (see below) or find distribution packages.
Packages
For openSUSE there is a package.
Ubuntu ships an outdated version of the plugin in 11.10 which will crash. Expect a better experience in 12.4.
Getting the Latest Code
Building Qt in your home directory
Only needed when you want to test the latest or your distribution does not have Qt 4.8 packages yet.
If you want to build Qt in you home directory, follow these instructions, otherwise skip to the next section.
git clone git://gitorious.org/qt/qt.git ~/qt4 cd ~/qt4 git checkout 4.8 ./configure -confirm-license -opensource -no-phonon -debug -no-webkit -fast make -j2
You do not have to make install. The configure options build without Phonon which avoids some problems with KDE applications that ship their own Phonon.
After building Qt, you need to export a few variables so that it will be found by applications.
export QTDIR="~/qt4" export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$QTDIR/lib:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH export PATH=$QTDIR/bin:$PATH export QT_ACCESSIBILITY=1
Updating Qt
Once you have Qt built in your home directory, you might want to update it at some point. To fetch the latest patches and build them do:
cd ~/qt4 git pull make -j2
Bridge plugin
This is the plugin that makes Qt communicate with AT-SPI via D-Bus.
Once you have Qt 4.8, building this plugin is easy.
git clone git://gitorious.org/qt-at-spi/qt-at-spi.git cd qt-at-spi qmake make make install
You might need to use qmake-qt4 or qmake4 if you have qmake default to the Qt 3 version. When building with system Qt, you'll have to use sudo to make install.
Updating the bridge
To update to the latest version of the bridge:
cd qt-at-spi make make install
Running KDE/Qt applications
Before starting an application you will have to set the environment variables as mentioned above if you build your own Qt. Otherwise just set:
export QT_ACCESSIBILITY=1
Then start the application in the same terminal.
Status
Please report problems you encounter on the kde-accessibility@kde.org.
Qt 4.8.0
- The basics should work, Orca reads focused widgets
- Many text editing widgets do not updated properly when editing or selecting text
Qt 4.8.1
You can grab the 4.8 branch from gitorious.
- Better support in text editing widgets