Ubuntu – How to disable Qt accessibility in 12.04

12.04accessibilitykde4

Observed behavior

When opening a KDE session, a blue round icon with a human silhouette appears in tray. It offers "enable screensaver" "speak text" "speak keyboard".

It seems related to processes /usr/lib/kde4/libexec/kaccessibleapp and kaccess.

I don't really care. So far so good.

Context

I've hit a bug and reported it to KDE. Maintainer says :

The backtrace also indicates, that you may be use Qt with accessibility enabled. If this is the case, please ask in the forums of your distribution how to disable Qt accessibility, and report back, if this fixes the issue.

Wished behavior

I wish "Qt accessibility off". That may mean not having this applet running.

Solutions already tried

  1. Looking in KDE preference panel. There is an accessibility group (visual bell, modifier keys, keyboard filter), seems unrelated to "qt accessibility", does not mention the applet.
  2. Googled, find various "solutions" for older KDE, none worked.
  3. Searched AskUbuntu. Some questions on similar topics, not this one.
  4. Tried brute force. If I kill processes containing the string "kaccess", (e.g. killall -v kaccessibleapp kaccess kglobalaccess ) it restarts right away.
  5. Tried purging "kaccessible" package.

Even after all this, qt accessibility features are still enabled, according to valgrind log.

Conclusion

How can I just disable qt accessibility features ? I don't need them at all and they may be the cause of the first problem.

Thank you for helping the community.

Best Answer

The package maintainer at KDE level provided a hint.

If everything fails, check which package installs /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/qt4/plugins/accessiblebridge/libqspiaccessiblebridge.so and try to remove it. If you cannot, because of dependencies, you can manually move the file away as root, and restart the desktop. This should remove support for Qt accessibility.

On Ubuntu 12.04 that boils down to sudo dpkg --purge qt-at-spi which effectively disables Qt accessibility.

This is a bit brute force (for example, it does not allow to enable accessibility for some users only), but it does answer the question with an effective solution, right ?

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