Yesterday we discussed the state of KDE Accessibility. There were great and productive discussions for two hours straight, the first hour is summarized in this post, the second hour was more technical, educating developers about accessibility APIs and and tools for testing.
We really need more people help testing and discussing what is needed. And of course we need people interested in defining solutions and then implementing them. Topics are very broad and this post is just a start to get some thoughts out. We will need separate threads for all sub-topics later on.
We want to use the forum to attract new people, then blog and e-mail about it. The forums are a great place to start though.
Ideally we'll have a job-board which allows to post "things to do" that are of a limited scope to invite people to come along.

Everything below is the list of things we discussed:

• Websites: is http://kde.org accessible enough? this needs feedback! There are issues such as not having an H1 header.
• http://accessibility.kde.org needs work, there is really nothing. Let's approach the visual design group.
• We could move the website to git if that makes working on it easier. Maybe someone even wants to help out with that.
• Certainly missing on the website is a link to forums which we will use more going forward.

We have some junior jobs that would benefit everyone greatly:

• Testing KDE applications with big font sizes: for low vision users the layouts need to be flexible enough to accomodate setting the font to a bigger size. This is often easier and more functional than using magnification. It would be interesting to define a maximum font size that should still work. At some point using a magnifier is the right solution.
• Magnification: KMag and the KWin plugin have overlapping functionallity that could greatly complement each other. It would be lovely to integrate and merge the two.
• Spell checking everywhere: this is a great feature that will benefit everyone. It needs some investigation and may need patches to Qt in order to globally have every line edit and text field spell checked. This benefits people writing in foreign languages, those who are weak in spelling and really everyone when they don't pay too close attention to what they are typing. (Both Windows 8 and OS X have this feature).
• Profiles in the system settings that easily adapt the destop for big fonts, colors etc.
• Virtual Keyboard work: there are several virtual keyboards, find out what is used by default and extend it (there were several features requests on the accessibility mailing list in the last two years).
• Keyboard accessibility options in the control center module (systemsettings): lot's of clean up needed, we should remove the system bell as it's a concept that is not really used any more. That will allow to clean up and simplify the settings a lot.

Accessibility improvements for screen reader users:

• KDE Frameworks 5: some widgets need improvements, for example the rating widget and date picker.
• Plasma Next: KickOff (the menu) and system tray need some love. KRunner also needs a bit of work to play nicer with screen readers. The traditional menu works mostly fine. Once KRunner is fixed we can invite some users to test with screen readers.
• Okular would be a great thing to get working and we have it's maintainer on board.

If you think things are missing, please add them to this thread. Should you be interested in working on some of this, let's start a new thread to keep this one manageable.

frederik wrote:http://accessibility.kde.org needs work, there is really nothing. Let's approach the visual design group.

Some comments to your checklist pages:

• VDG recently added a new guideline for layouts. Your section on dialog layout should be adopted to "command" and "navigation" pattern.
• Our smallest screen resolution is now 1024x768 [1].
• Wording and Font are covered in several pages.
• The section on Warnings and Error messages can be found below User Assistance with almost the same content.
• And, of course, we have a section for icon design.

I think you can either link the HIG pages below your check list or integrate your stuff into the HIG. Maybe a separate accessibility page below Presentation makes sense.

[1] During the Akademy workshop we noticed that applications often do not run in full size. The text is misleading and should be has been changed.

The website was/is old and broken. I took a quick look and with some help from ingo in #kde-www got it working again with the new theme etc. I also fixed the menus a bit for the navigation so everything isn't under one "KDE Accessibility Project" menu anymore, since just above the menu it says KDE Accessibility anyway. Some more work on content could definitely be done though.

I also started an rsync of svn to my machine so I can test the svn -> git conversion rules I just put together and requested a git repo for the site once that's ready and such.

Frederik, Anyone who was at the workshop,

Could you give a bit more detail about the junior jobs? I.e. what's required to install in order to test those things, how to test, who to e-mail/ping on irc to get things fixed, etc. I have been running plasma-next for a month or so, but am not sure what to do to test accessibility features besides install orca, run it, and see what works, what doesn't etc. Is there something a bit more detailed than that somewhere?

accessibility.kde.org content is coming from git kde:websites/accessibility-kde-org repo now. All content and history has moved and old svn content replaced with a README file pointing to the new location.