[FEATURE]: Keyboard and screen reader navigation for Imager

[nickgaw]

What happened?

A bug happened!I myself am totally blind and am trying to use rpi-imager to image a new SD card. When I open up rpi-imager and try to tab threw the options I am unable to do so as tab does nothing. Making the program fully accessible under windows and the mac both which have built in accessibility tools included would greatly help a lot. http://www.microsoft.com/enable and http://www.apple.com/accessibility have great accessibility information and with orca in linux the gnome project has lots of information on their web site. Windows has narrator in it and the mac has the voice over screen reader in it which lets blind users use the mac with just a keyboard. Fighting with a mouse that I do not normally use is not the best way to use an application and the raspberry pi image release notes do talk about a way to install orca by pressing control and alt and space but this could easily be done in the imager so that on first boot accessibility is turned on automatically. As a totally blind student who is studying programming I feel that as the raspberry pi foundation says they care about accessibility but then their tools are almost unusable with the keyboard I feel this is not the best practice and really needs to be looked into as soon as possible.

Version

1.8.5 (Default)

What host operating system were you using?

Windows

Host OS Version

11

Selected OS

the latest raspberry pi operating system

Which Raspberry Pi Device are you using?

Raspberry Pi 5

What kind of storage device are you using?

microSD Card in an internal reader

OS Customisation

• Yes, I was using OS Customisation when the bug occurred.

Relevant log output

No response

[tdewey-rpi]

Hi @nickgaw,

Thanks for the report. I aim for Raspberry Pi Imager to be as friction-free for as large a population as possible, and it sounds like we've fallen short here.

Focus hopping was not a deliberate omission - instead, it was one I think we expected our toolkit (qt) to provide out of the box.

Unfortunately we don't have a mechanism to pre-provision packages in Raspberry Pi Imager today - so including Orcas would have to be done in the OS that was downloaded. My understanding is that Raspberry Pi OS provides a mechanism to do this (per your description), however I will consider adding the option to insert packages into an OS. Note that such a mechanism will have to be strictly controlled, due to the varying operating assumptions of the various OSes offered by Imager. As such, the mechanism will have to be opted in by the various OS providers - which will be straightforward for Raspberry Pi OS, but possibly a longer-term item for some of the more exotic distributions.

With your permission, I will fracture and rewrite this issue such that:

• This issue specifically becomes about focus hopping and screen reading; and
• A new Feature Request is created to cover injecting packages into a chosen OS

Please reply with a confirmation you're happy for me to restructure the issue accordingly.

[nickgaw]

Yes I am fine with you converting this to an feature request as also the accessibility of the graphical user interface for both windows and mac operating systems which do have accessibility in them so testing them out with the keyboard should be very doable. I know that QT has accessibility in it but it has to be taken advantage of in order to work properly.

[tdewey-rpi]

Some changes in this direction have been included in v1.9.0, but I've not yet done a full walk of the application purely with keyboard due to time constraints.

I hope these changes improve the situation, and will try to get time to do the full walk within the next month.