SUMMARY Currently accessibility settings feel very unhelpful as it does not include many much-needed features and KDE settings in general make it extremely hard to find the accessibility features needed. I will try to explain why and what needs to be done As a visually impaired person myself i heavily rely on accessibility tools like magnifiers, Dark mode and more. Whenever I install or try new distro or DE My first instinct is to search for accessibility > Zoom and mostly i never had a problem finding the tool i need by myself on first try with most other DE's and other operating systems like windows. But, with KDE my first experience was extremely painful as if i search for Zoom anywhere search results won't show something like zoom or accessibility instead it would show Desktop Effects which makes it completely unintuitive and as i cannot read without zoom the UI was extremely confusing to me. So, i had to ask someone for help and they did not know anything about KDE or linux in general, above all people lack patience they always expect to find things instantly as such they would just read whatever I ask them to read and when they read Desktop Effects again and again it just made things worse and since zoom is not immediately visible when i asked them to see if they can find something like zoom, they said "NO". which made things extremely confusing with all my confusion i kept insisting it should be under accessibility as zoom is an accessibility feature. Then it took me two days to finaly figure out where Zoom is Even now after knowing more about KDE and playing around with settings sometimes i still feel like things are really unintuitive when it comes to accessibility things are very much scattered FEATURES REQUESTED It would be nice to see more accessibility features added to KDE. The following features should either be newly implemented or existing features should atleast be placed under appropriate sections under accessibility settings. Existing Kwin desktop effects should either be moved to settings > Accessibility or at the very least get shortcuts linking to the necessary features These features should also be easily searchable from anywhere on the desktop. For visually impaired users Zoom - Fullscreen zoom, Lens Zoom and Dock Color inversion High Contrast - high contrast with ability to switch between high contrast "Light" and "Dark" themes Font Size adjustments - Options for font sizes ranging from Very Small to Very Huge with preset font sizes Color Correction Grayscale Visual effects and animations - Ability to enable or disable visual effects like animations, transparency and more Mouse pointer Adjustments Screen Reader For Hearing impaired Mono Audio Captions Visual feedback For physically impaired Speech to text Keyboard adjustments And more required accessibility options with a cleaner intuitive interface and searchable properties for accessibility tools. ADDITIONAL INFORMATION Issue 439840 mentions similar issue Although i appreciate the fine-grained controls KDE offers When implementing these accessibility features, please try to focus on providing intuitive presets and defaults. Wich would offer a much better UX for people with disabilities compared to them trying to figure out and finetune every aspect of the desktop.
Hello Sai, Thanks for your input, it's very valuable. We currently have an accessibility initiative and are interested in improving things. Unfortunately it's also not super actionable in the form of a bug report, as each bug report needs to be self-contained, about only one thing. You did a good job with Bug 462233. Do you think you could file additional bug reports, one per feature request, bug, or idea for improvement? Then add it to the See Also field of this bug report so we can find them. Thanks a lot!
Sure, thats understandable and I'll try my best and this issue in particular is more about making accessibility features more discoverable for someone with a disability and also about organizing them in a way that would feel more intuitive to users.
Well, OP is not wrong about things being scattered. Zoom and many other things are geoupped based on their implementation details (being a desktop effect — whatever that means) instead of being handly "scattered" across various expected locations like accecibility, windows switching, windows effects etc. System Settings does have a search that works for page content text, and can suggest Desktop Effects based on particular effect name as a query, but it won't auto-select it or at least scroll down the list. Integrations are lacking.