About Us

What KDE Accessibility Is About

Our goal is to make the entirety of the K Desktop Environment and (by necessity) its underlying technologies usable by and as efficient as possible for disabled users of all types.

We like to make a complete accessible desktop as a free alternative to the expensiveness of commercial assistive technologies. By cooperating with other free solutions, interoperability with other accessibility software programs (e.g. GNOME applications) can be ensured.

Making all of KDE fully accessible is a huge task, but it also involves very small things. A missing keyboard shortcut might be just a bit annoying for most people, but it makes the programs unusable for others. This is why the KDE Accessibility Projects aims to raise the awareness of accessibility issues among all people involved in KDE.

Why KDE Accessibility Matters

KDE accessibility matters for a number of reasons. There are legal and financial reasons: in many countries, including the United States and many nations in the EU, in order for the government to use technology (free or otherwise), it must be accessible to the disabled. There are also what one might categorize as "moral" reasons: free software should not just be free for all, but also usable at a basic level by all. And accessible to all. For yet others making KDE accessible matters because of their love for KDE an desire to share "the KDE experience" with all or because it is a programming challenge.

Perhaps the most important reason KDE accessibility matters is because using KDE and its applications is necessity: users of all physical abilities need to be able to access KDE applications, utilities, settings, and application-generated files in order to work and communicate with others.

Finally, making the K Desktop Environment accessible helps Linux and other free desktop on which KDE runs become an even more ideal platform (in terms of cost and quality) and computing environment for disabled users (and all users).

Interviews

• Interview with Gunnar Schmi Dt (maintainer of the kdeaccessibility CVS module)
• Interview about Text-To-Speech Support in KDE

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