Hi all, A while back I posted a question on this list about applications written with the QT GUI toolkit. They worked on my previous Macs but not my current one. After a lot of fiddling around, I know have a solution to get QT applications working as they once did: You need to go into System Preferences/Accessibility (Universal Access for those of you not upgraded to Mountain Lion). At the bottom of the window there is a checkbox labeled "Enable Access for Assistive Devices." This is unchecked by default. You need to turn this on and, once you do, OS X will prompt you for an administrator password. Enter it and then load up a QT application. They will now work as before.
Caveats: This will only enable basic accessibility in QT applications that are compiled with accessibility enabled and bundle the QT accessible widgets plugin. This means that it will not enable access to every QT app. Further, QT's accessibility support is extremely basic. Controls such as buttons, lists, radio buttons, and edit fields will speak. Some more advanced controls, such as tree views or custom widgets, will still be rendered as unknown to Voiceover. QT 5.0 is set to use a more updated Cocoa-based API to expose this information and is also set to expose controls such as tree views. However, QT 5.0 is still in early development and is not widely used as of now. Applications I've tested: * TeamTalk 4.4: Works well except for the user/channel list, which is a tree view. * Rockbox Utility: Works fine save for the devices tree view, though you can get around this by selecting the path of your device manually and having the utility detect which device you're dealing with. * VirtualBox: Does not bundle the accessible widgets and will not load them, so does not work. Command-line use will still allow you to use it, but can take time to learn. * Calibre (Ebook manager and converter): Same as Virtualbox though, being open source, I may try and rebuild it with the appropriate flags and plugin included. At the moment I use the command-line for ebook conversion, which takes a bit of manual setup. * Mumble: Does not bundle the accessible widgets and has no command-line equivalents. Unuseable. Technical Explanation: QT version 4.0 implements basic OS X accessibility, but it does so via the Carbon API, which is now deprecated. Enabling this option allows older and third-party toolkits to communicate through the OS X accessibility API. In a sense, it installs a bridge between the native Cocoa accessibility API and non-Cocoa toolkits that wish to access it. This is off by default, and simply turning on Voiceover does not change the status of this option. This also enables a great deal of Applescript controls for UI elements in applications that are not normally scriptable, as well as installing additional keyboard hooks for advanced typing utilities. It is off by default, from what I can tell, because there is a theoretical security risk associated with this, e.g. if you unintentionally installed a key logger trojan. However, I know of no actual security risks in the wild relating to the use of this option. I hope this helps anyone out there having the same trouble I was. It took quite a while to find this, as there is not much documentation on the subject. Jake -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "MacVisionaries" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/macvisionaries?hl=en.
