New KDE 3.4 A Sight For Poor Eyes
The KDE Foundation released version 3.4 of its open source desktop operating environment yesterday, which includes features that satisfy accessibility groups and more than 6,500 bug fixes.
Source: Internet NewsSince the version 3.3 release in August, more than 80,000 contributions were made to the project, which translates into "several million lines of code and documentation added or changed," according to the foundation.
Accessibility is one of the key features of the new release, which is improved via a new KDE text-to-speech framework (KTTS)that integrates with a number of KDE desktop applications. Users can enjoy text-to-speech capabilities from Konquer (KDE's KHTML Web browser), as well as PDF documents.
The new KSayIt application extends the speech capabilities even further by verbalizing notifications from all KDE applications, as well as "speaking" any given text file. High-contrast themes, as well as a monochrome icon set, have also been added to further help those that have low vision.
"With each new release, KDE continues to enhance its support for people with disabilities," Janina Sajka, chair of the Accessibility Workgroup of the Free Standards Group, said in a statement. "This is making KDE more and more attractive to more persons with disabilities. And, it's also helping KDE meet various social inclusion objectives worldwide, such as the Section 508 requirements of the U.S. government."
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