Hello planets, long time no see…
I don’t blog unless there’s something interesting to say, so here it comes: after less than a month I’m happy to release qt-at-spi 0.3 succeeding version 0.2.
What is that thing? A bridge that lets Qt applications interface with the AT-SPI accessibility framework that GNOME provides. For users that mostly means that the Orca screenreader should work nicely with Qt applications.
This project keeps evolving and as you’d expect in an accessibility plugin that is completely hidden from the user, development is just about bugfixing and getting it in shape to play nice with other existing infrastructure.
What made me happy this time around, and what triggered the short cycle since the last release is that I started getting more and more feedback from Orca users.
Thanks to Joanie and Mike and others I could finally nail down some old issues in the tree view handling.
As always this goes together with some fixes in Qt itself, so you might want to grab the 4.8 branch of Qt that will soon be 4.8.2 if you want to try the latest and greatest.
Changes since 0.2:
- Send keyboard events only when someone is listening
- Fix caching of tree and table items (Orca will no longer read outdated data)
- Fix at least one crash and one off-by-one error when reading tree items
- The usual internal cleanup and improvments that won’t be noticable
Dependencies: Qt 4.8.0 and newer.
You need a distribution that uses AT-SPI 2 (check your packages, any recent distro should do, this is part of standard GNOME).
The source can be found here: https://gitorious.org/qt-at-spi
It doesn’t give a file with file name extension, but extracting it should work fine.
For help setting things up, please refer to: http://userbase.kde.org/Accessibility
And for a bit more information for developers: http://techbase.kde.org/Development/Tutorials/Accessibility
<Update>
Of course you find another crasher the day after the release, so grab v0.3.1 instead which fixes accessing some invalid objects and some more issues in for example KMail.
Download the tar.gz from gitorious: http://gitorious.org/qt-at-spi/qt-at-spi/archive-tarball/v0.3.1
sha256sum d7ee0a628771e6d2659dff1850d8c436fcf001b2f98f47954cd6a8c4eff4ea1a
md5sum cc749ef766f8a199b603a7d5fb723006