rizinorg/cutter

Make Cutter accessible for users with disabilities

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#889 opened on Oct 30, 2018

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DocumentationEnhancementHelp WantedUIWaiting-For: Community

Description

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe. The Cutter project should be as accessible as possible to users with disabilities. This including color (red/green) blindness, full and partial blindness, users with a screen reader and more.

Describe the solution you'd like The solution should follow the best-practices written by the QT community as can be found in the following articles:

Worth mention, that the developers should aim to collaborate with users that need and use such technologies.

The Qt documentation lists a basic checklist that any application should aim for. Some of these points were already implemented in Cutter.

  • Usability - Usability and user centric design generally lead to more usable applications, including improvements for people with various abilities.
  • Fonts - Font settings should follow the system/platform. This allows users to select fonts for readability and increasing the font size.
  • Colors - Provide enough contrast and consider the most common cases of low vision and color blindness. Make sure that the application is usable, for example, for people with red/green blindness, and don't depend on colors only.
  • Scalable UI - A user interface that works in various sizes and properly supports different fonts and accommodates size changes.
  • Assistive Technology - Support the use of assistive tools (AT). Either use standard widgets/controls which support ATs out of the box, or make sure that your custom widgets and controls support accessibility properly. In order to learn more about this read on below.

Blind reverse engineers? Is this really needed? Yes. As a community-driven project, I believe we should set a goal to make Cutter as friendlier as possible to a wide range of users, including those who use assistive technology. There is a famous question in the Reverse Engineering Q&A site asking for recommendations for such applications: Stack Exchange RE | best alternatives to IDA, Immunity and Ollydbg for a blind user.

What other RE software did? While I'm not aware of all efforts taken by other RE applications, I can point a few things that were done by them.

Binary Ninja supports the option to modify the colors for red/green blindness. As well as offers a high-contrast theme. image

IDA Pro announced several times that "in recent versions of IDA (especially 6.95) we made big improvements for accessibility, especially on Windows and Linux". Igor Skochinsky, from IDA, stated that efforts were made in collaboration with blind users.

Contributor guide

Tech stack
cpp
Domain
accessibility
Issue type
feature
DifficultyEstimated implementation difficulty for a new contributor, from 1 for very small changes to 5 for expert-level work.
3
Estimated timeA rough time range for an experienced contributor to investigate, implement, test, and prepare a pull request.
1-2 days
Activity statusHow available the issue appears right now: fresh, active, stale, blocked, or waiting on maintainer input.
stale
ClarityHow clearly the issue explains the expected change, acceptance criteria, and next step.
clear
Prerequisites
Basic knowledge of C++Familiarity with Qt frameworkUnderstanding of accessibility concepts
Newbie friendlinessA 1-100 score estimating how approachable this issue is for first-time contributors.
55
Research direction
Start by reading the Qt accessibility documentation linked in the issue (e.g., Qt Documentation | Accessibility and KDE TechBase checklist). Then examine the existing Cutter source code, particularly the GUI widgets in the src/gui/ directory, to identify where accessibility attributes (like accessible names, roles, and descriptions) are missing. Consider reaching out to users who rely on assistive technology for collaboration. The issue does not specify a concrete first step, so focus on implementing the basic checklist items like ensuring proper color contrast and keyboard navigation.