Get Involved/accessibility - KDE Community Wiki

By making KDE available to a wider audience, you will help make computing easier for people with visual, auditory and motor disabilities. Some governments and large companies have specific criteria for procuring software. By following standardized procedures for documenting the compatibility of KDE with accessibility technology, KDE software will be a much better candidate for users with special needs.

Communicating with the team

There are many ways to get in touch with the team:

Through the Matrix room for #kde-accessibility

Through the IRC room for kde-accessibility (bridged to Matrix)

Through the mailing list for KDE Accessibility

Mentorship program

KDE is a big community, and translating its software is a big project. It is easy to feel lost when you first start. Several people have volunteered to help new members by answering your questions and pointing you to the right places. You can find a list on the mentoring page.

Accessibility applications

KDE apps under the Accessibility category
KMag to zoom in on the screen
KMouseTool to automate clicks
KMouth to make the computer speak what's written
System Settings page for Accessibility
Accessibility Inspector

Contributing

The main activities of the project include assessing and improving the accessibility features of KDE. This may include various aspects of software, websites, legal compliance and documentation.

Our guidelines on how to make applications accessible can be seen in the KDE Human Interface Guidelines: Accessibility and inclusiveness.

Our work is tracked on KDE Invent under the Accessibility Team issue tracker. To interact there you will need to create an Identity account as mentioned in Infrastructure/GitLab.

For historical purposes, previously our work used to be tracked on the Accessibility Project Phabricator page.

There are many ways in which you can contribute:

By testing our software using accessibility tools like a screen reader such as Orca or a WCAG-compliant contrast checker such as Kontrast
By fixing our software using Qt accessibility facilities for QtQuick/Kirigami apps or QtWidgets apps
By reporting accessibility issues
By discussing accessibility issues with the team
By updating outdated screenshots or adding alternative text to existing images
By making our documentation more accessible

Inspecting KDE software for accessibility issues

You can use specialized software to check the accessibility tree, a treeview list of all GUI components in an application and their accessible labels that can be read by screen readers, letting developers verify that the labels are correct.

Install Accessibility Inspector.

In the Settings menu, tick "Enable Accessibility". This will allow Accessibility Inspector (and other accessibility software like Accerciser) to look at the accessibility tree in all currently running applications.

Another way to set this is with the Qt environment variable QT_LINUX_ACCESSIBILITY_ALWAYS_ON=1 for the whole session, but unlike the "Enable Accessibility" option, it only works for Qt and KDE applications. For GNOME applications, there is GNOME_ACCESSIBILITY=1.

After this, open any KDE application, such as KCalc. It should show up in Accessibility Inspector.

If KCalc does not appear, click on View > Reset Tree.

Accessibility Inspector will update its window contents live based on the application's accessibility properties. Items that are crossed out are not currently visible in the application's UI.

Going down the accessibility tree you will notably find some important properties: Name, Description, Role, Localized Role, State and AccessibleId, which are used to make an application accessible to screen readers. These should match the respective QtWidgets QAccessible and QtQuick Accessible properties, and are used for Appium Automation Testing.

Community Documentation

Resources from GTK and GNOME that can be useful for understanding accessibility for desktop apps: