Plasma 5.26 Improving Widget Accessibility, Kickoff Gets Compact Mode + Wayland Fixes

It's been another busy summer week for KDE developers with many new features and fixes landing within this open-source desktop stack.

KDE continues seeing much feature work for Plasma 5.26, polishing of existing features, and continuing to address various outstanding bugs. Some of the highlights for the week include:

- Plasma 5.26 will make all Plasma widgets fully compatible/usable with screen readers.

- Support for managing permissions on Samba shares remotely.

- Plasma NetworkManager's OpenConnect VPN adds support for the F5, Fortinet, and Array protocols in Plasma 5.26.

- Kickoff is adding an optional "Compact" mode that shows more menu items at a time.

- KDE System Settings' Night Color page now allows using a map for picking a manual location for night mode.

- The opening/closing animations for Overview, Present Windows, and Desktop Grid effects last longer to make them feel smoother.

- Changing the Global Theme to one that has its own color scheme will apply immediately now for all running GTK applications that are themed with the Breeze GTK theme.

- Fixed a "major regression" in Plasma Wayland's multi-monitor support that could lead to screens to display no outputs.

- Also under the Plasma Wayland session, certain apps like GIMP no longer sometimes fail to appear in the Task Manager.

More details on this week's KDE changes via this blog post by KDE developer Nate Graham.