Re : Re: Accessibility in VirtualBox

[MENGUAL Jean-Philippe]

> 
> Hello guys,
> 
> First of all let me introduce myself. I am VirtualBox GUI architect who is  
> working on accessibility support for nearest and subsequent releases. We  
> plan to make our application fully accessible with the next major release  

Nice to read you!

> - not yet with 5.2. There will be step-by-step improvements during  
> subsequent 5.2.x maintenance releases, also integrating basic  
> accessibility support.
> 
> During the 5.2 development cycle the accessibility was heavily reworked,  
> many code was written from scratch. But the code is still under  
> development and was tested mostly with macOS (with VoiceOver) and partly  
> with Windows hosts (with Narrator), not on Linux.
> 
> Making VirtualBox accessible on cross-platform basis is not an easy task.  
> We will need your patience and help with testing our changes. Meanwhile I  
> am writing documentation which describes VirtualBox user interface  
> accessibility aspects step-by-step.

Great. I am sure people such as Samuel can help for technical stuff, as he knows how things work from an architecture point of view, in particular in Linux.

> Also I have few questions to determine which the general directions should  
> be covered first of all:
> 1. Which hosts and screen-readers are you using mostly? Is any of you  
> willing to help us with testing screen-reader support on macOS?

I use Orca on Debian testing. Unable to help for Mac.

> 2. What's the preferred way of describing various VirtualBox controls  
> through accessibility interface (when you are hovering each of controls  
> with mouse or screen-reader focus)? Is it better to describe everything  
> with full precise explanation or to be strict and short as possible?

COuld you give an example, I dont understand the question. In general when using a screen reader, the user only uses the keyboard and has feedback of the widget where the focus is located. So the fist thing is to ensure the labels are present on widgets, they are in a relevant tree so that qt-at-spi or atk can give relevant info to the assistive techno, and the intercace has accessible features with keyboard and mouse.

It results that when the caret (focus) is on a control, the label should just be the name of it (for example, new, Create a machine, Preferences, etc), the same as displayed on the screen. Details are in bullets, but then just accessible optionally and not by default in browsing.

> 3. Feedback and suggestions are always appreciated. Some things are easier  
> than others for us to change of course. Things which can be changed, in  
> order of increasing effort, include element text, grouping structure and  
> element class (button, group, list, item...).

I thinks it is the most important points actually in a first step. As you will see in my bugreports, the problem on current releases is that some labels are missing. I suggest you begin with this "simple" task: tracking not-labelled widgets and do it if relevant. I think it will improve the situation.

Next, yes it is probably a more difficult task (I think of the bug I report about the crash of VBox in some situations, etc).

Best regards, 
> -- 
> WBR,
> [Oracle/VirtualBox] Sergey Dubov