adaptation of calibre for blind people

Ptitprince · 02-23-2014, 07:51 AM

Hello Kovid,

I receive today e-mail of a blind person who asks to me whether it would be possible to adapt calibre for their specific handicap.
Perhaps does there exist already solutions to be proposed to these people?

Here a translated copy from french of this e-mail:

Quote:

Hello,
By this e-mail I see that you seem to be able to communicate with the author of calibre… Could you then announce to him that this software which however appears excellent is completely inaccessible to equipment of adaptation for blinds (such JAWS of freedom scientific or NVDA) even if some shortcuts keyboard can sometimes make accept an accessibility which appears with the unusable use in fact.
I spent much time personally helped by a friend of this list to try to use them without practically any success.
This is strong damage because the ebooks are now for the blinds one of the best sources of possible reading, and they have like you problems of ranking, conversion, renaming, etc
I thank you by advance

Bernard

Regards

Ptitprince

kovidgoyal · 02-23-2014, 08:02 AM

Qt (the graphics toolkit calibre uses) does not support accessibility. Well, to be precise, it does have accessibility plugins, but they cause random program crashes. So making calibre compatible with screen readers is not practical.

Rich_Morin · 06-01-2018, 07:07 PM

The FAQ still advises users to disable Universal Access and VoiceOver on Macs. However, it seems possible that Qt's plugins have improved enough since 2014 that an accessible version of calibre might be possible. Could someone fill me in on the current situation, gating issues, etc?

kovidgoyal · 06-01-2018, 09:57 PM

I've still seen crashes with accessibility enabled in Qt. But try it for yourself and see.

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02-23-2014, 08:02 AM	#2
kovidgoyal creator of calibre Posts: 45,221 Karma: 27110894 Join Date: Oct 2006 Location: Mumbai, India Device: Various	Qt (the graphics toolkit calibre uses) does not support accessibility. Well, to be precise, it does have accessibility plugins, but they cause random program crashes. So making calibre compatible with screen readers is not practical.

06-01-2018, 07:07 PM	#3
Rich_Morin Junior Member Posts: 1 Karma: 10 Join Date: Jun 2018 Device: none	The FAQ still advises users to disable Universal Access and VoiceOver on Macs. However, it seems possible that Qt's plugins have improved enough since 2014 that an accessible version of calibre might be possible. Could someone fill me in on the current situation, gating issues, etc?

06-01-2018, 09:57 PM	#4
kovidgoyal creator of calibre Posts: 45,221 Karma: 27110894 Join Date: Oct 2006 Location: Mumbai, India Device: Various	I've still seen crashes with accessibility enabled in Qt. But try it for yourself and see.

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