KDE Summit: Open-source software developers focus on "usability"

ZDNet China reported on April 9 (Article: Ingrid Marson/Translation: jasmine): developers of the new Linux Desktop Environment KDE are working to make their software easier to use by people with disabilities.

Ease of use is a theme of the KDE community global summit held in luviciburg, Germany. Earlier this week, the Summit held a "Unix usability Forum ". On this forum, KDE's developer haladde demonstrated how to use GOK keyboard in KDE's development tool Qt to use the "display keyboard" in GNOME, another Linux desktop environment ". It also demonstrated how to run the screen text-speech conversion software Gnopernicus in KDE.

The new version of KDE will be compatible with usability software that can only be run in GNOME. KDE developers will also ensure that all application software in the new version can support the ease-of-use features of the Linux operating system, and will improve tools for automatic mouse usage, partial screen enlargement, and text conversion to speech.

Schmidt, a KDE developer, said on Tuesday that Qt changes will ensure that all interfaces of KDE provide the appropriate information to assist technologies. He also pointed out that GOK "display keyboard" is a good complement to the features of the KMouth text-speech conversion software. He said that KMouth and GOK are good partners. If users do not speak, they can use these two types of software to communicate with others.

Janina, who is in charge of the free standards group usability Working Group, said that users who care about usability do not care about the operating system, and they do not care about where the application software comes from, as long as they are easy to use. Janina warned that the high price of proprietary usability software was unacceptable, especially because many disabled students did not work. Compared with proprietary software, open-source software with ease-of-use features higher customization, so that people with disabilities can better adapt to their needs.

IBM is one of the major commercial usability software providers. KDE developers pointed out on this forum that ViaVoice will soon be transplanted to the Linux platform.

From: ZDNet China