Can I force all labels in KDE applications to be copyable?

I know this is a shot in the dark, and probably a little bit of an absurd thing to think is possible to do retroactively to compiled software, but is there any feasible way I could force all text to be possible to copy?

The reason I ask is that recently, my mother asked me to copy some text from within a webpage. Consequently, I opened Absolute Enable Right Click & Copy – Get this Extension for 🦊 Firefox (en-US) and thought to myself “How silly, I wish she could just get in her head that the extension in the toolbar lets her to that to webpages that have it disabled”.

However, this made me wonder. I have this issue a lot using most applications - I want to quote something for a bug report or to check on later, and realize that I either have to screenshot and OCR it (how silly is that?) or write it again myself.

I’ve heard from bug reports about individual labels in certain KDE programs that this functionality is generally disabled for the sake of performance, but imagine how incredible of a boon this would be for accessibility if someone sees text and can simply copy it without having to worry about whether that ability has been arbitrarily disabled?

Take

for instance – why can I not copy the heading and description? I want to use them in a bug report, but instead I have to take time rewriting it. This becomes a lot more problematic when I want to copy an extract of a description of a feature than merely the heading.

I can here:

…despite there being much less reason for anyone to ever want to copy that.

I’ve specified KDE applications in this question because all of Qt would be a question for (the wasteland at) https://forum.qt.io/ and anything more broad would be fundamentally unachievable without adding automatic OCR to the compositor (which would be a hack anyway).


I’ve been trying to think in a more accessibility-focused manner recently, and have realized the many reasons why those who I’ve always deemed technically incompetent simply don’t like using computers. It makes a lot of sense.

No there is not, it’s an inherent technical limitation within Qt.

For QtQuick applications, normal Text components do not have any way to select text (because it does is display text). For KDE applications they have the option to use SelectableLabel but that’s basically a big hack because it’s actually a read-only TextArea. See this Qt bug report.

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So depending upon how that’s fixed (if it ever is) all Qt text labels could become copy by-default or if specified? Loading... seems to demonstrate so.

Thank you, @redstrate.

Loading... appears that if implemented would provide exatcly what I desire, in fact, whereas Loading... appears application-specific, so at least I’d be able to enable it for my applications if KDE Frameworks didn’t decide to enable it for all projects using it.