Accessibility Features in KDE

Settings in KControl

KDE has a number of mouse and keyboard related settings that can help handicapped people. You can configure them using the program kcontrol.

In the KDE 3.0.x and KDE 2.x branches, you find these settings under "Personalization > Accessibility". Here you can configure settings for the visual bell, for the keyboard and for the mouse.

In the KDE 3.1 branch, the accessibility module has been split. Settings for the visual bell and for the keyboard can be configured under "Regional & Accessibility > Accessibility". Mouse related accessibility settings have moved to "Peripherals > Mouse". We are working on a better solution for KDE 3.2.

Known Bugs

There was a bug which caused the "Sticky Keys" feature to be deactivated after a short period of inactivity. We found the reason for this strange bug and I provided a patch. The problem is solved since KDE 3.0.5.

SuSE's KDE 3.0.5 update unfortunately still contains the KDE 3.0.4 version of kdebase, but the bug is fixed in the packages of other distributions and in the source code for KDE 3.0.5. Please update KDE if you need this feature.

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