Dolphin related accessibility issues
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Orca should read the element type in dolphin (file, folder, device, link to folder, link to file) #13 (closed) -
Orca should read complete label in icon and compact view mode, currently it only speaks the name, but there could be additional information like the number of elements or the file size. -
Dolphin crashes with Compact View (switch with "Ctrl" + "2") and screen reader (orca) enabled #15 (closed) -
Orca is not able to announce Selecting / Unselecting files in Dolphin #21 (closed). It also never announces how many items are selected in total. -
Unlabeled button: If you press shift+tab from that grid view custom widget, you arrive to the location bar. After the edit location button, there's an unlabeled button. -
Tab trap: if you press tab past the zoom slider, you'll hear a phantom ", page tab", without that being on the screen to my knowledge, plus tab gets trapped there -
Dolphin opens on the home directory, but Orca doesn't tell you so. Consider enclosing the area in a frame/panel which updates its accessible name each time you modify the current path by entering or leaving a directory. -
I don't know what the folder presentation widget is, but it should be presented as a grid view. Currently, we have a terrible experience because the entire row of folders is read at once, with no indication that we can move left and right with the arrows to go between the elements of a row. When I found that out, however, I discovered that when you're on the last icon of the first row and press right arrow, you get to the first icon of the next row, but that's not announced, instead, the whole row is announced at once -
Orca should announce the current elements instead of "layered pane" when the Folder / File view gets the focus in dolphin #22 (closed) -
Orca reads only name in Table View only of Dolphin #16 (closed) -
Some users report a bad performance using the screen reader when the folder contains a lot of elements (> 10k elements) -
For a quick navigation ( to avoid a lot of tabbing while navigate between panels on screen) it could be a good idea to provide shortcuts to focus most important elements like places, view or properties. Dolphin contains a lot of widgets and elements to tab over while searching for or jumping between areas. The location bar can be jumped to with F6 and from with Enter. -
Items are sometimes confusingly announced as "collapsed" in contexts in which there is no concept of collapsing/expanding e.g. in icon view mode. -
Dolphin usually communicates errors or unexpected behaviour through a message banner above the view, but their text is not read out by Orca when they appear. -
Free space information in the status bar is not read out. The context menu that can be invoked from that text using a mouse/touch can not be invoked by keyboard. -
Some buttons in the toolbar can not get keyboard focus at all. (This might be fixable for all applications using the KXmlGui framework at once.) -
F10 is supposed to open a menu. This can either be a hamburger menu or a menu bar depending on the application. From my testing most popular applications outside of KDE follow this (Gnome HIG, Windows, …). KDE software should conform to this standard. (This should be fixable for all applications using KHamburgerMenu at once.)
In Dolphin for many years now F10 is bound to creating a new folder. This will have to go. It might be possible to only affect new installations with this change. -
Shift+F10 is supposed to act the same way as the "Menu" key and open the context menu. This is necessary because many keyboards do not have a "Menu" key. (This might be fixable for all of Plasma at once by having Shift+F10 generally trigger a "Menu" key press. This kind of solution might conflict with third-party applications though, but we can hope that those already conform to this accessibility standard.)
some helpful information:
- https://conf.kde.org/event/5/contributions/141/
- https://doc.qt.io/qt-6/qt.html#ItemDataRole-enum -> "AccessibleTextRole"
- a good way to debug some issues is the application "accerciser" (GTK). it shows the accessibility tree visually.
howto find accessibility issues
- install orca screenreader
- turn orca it on (type "orca" in konsole)
- you can change settings like voice by press "delete" + "space" (this opens up the orca settings dialog)
- try to navigation elements without touching the mouse
expectations:
- you should be able to do anything you could do with mouse
- you should get any information what are visually available
- You should never stuck using the keyboard in an "focus loop"
- it should not crash
Edited by Felix Ernst