injecting keystrokes into ubuntu system
i'm trying an experiment. I'm running naturallyspeaking on windows, and I want to inject it's output into an ubuntu system and treat the character stream as if it is coming from a keyboard. one implementation idea is to connect from windows to linux via ssh or mosh. with with focus on the ssh terminal emulator, NS sends all character output to that window. on the linux machine, I run a program that takes the NS generated character stream from stdin and injects it as described above. problem is I don't know how to do the injection. I've read up some on uinput but it is not clear if that is the right path. would appreciate some guidance. thanks! --- eric -- Ubuntu-accessibility mailing list Ubuntu-accessibility@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-accessibility
Re: iaccessible2 and linux (was Re: Lubuntu and Accessibility)
On 6/12/2011 2:40 AM, Isaac Porat wrote: Hi My comments were not a criticism of at-spi but rather the need were possible to unify accessibilities standard across platforms for the simple reason that if software vendors have to worry about one accessibility stack it is better than two or three, as Linux as very small user based it is always left behind by the main vendors. in my opinion, any criticism of the current accessibility world should not be focused on just cross platform but on how they don't really meet the needs of the disabled, application developers, or accessibility interface developers. I start from the principle that accessibility is defined by what the user needs, not what the application but accessibility interface vendor is willing to give. For example, nuance doesn't give me what I need (a speech user interface was sufficient discoverability) therefore, they don't provide sufficient accessibility. At the same time, I a assert that individual is responsible for their own accessibility because what the user needs depends on what they do and the nature of their disability. There's no way that any application or accessibility vendor can possibly provide that level of customization at a price that individual can afford. The second starting point is that trying to replicate a GUI or extract information from a GUI is a failed proposition. Speech user interfaces (spoken or heard) have entirely different structure. A blind person using a web application should here a small number of things essential to operating the interface and not all of the junk around the application unless they ask for it. A spoken interface is a wide and shallow interface where control the scope makes the same or similar command do different things. My personal objection to most of the current work is that they seem to ignore speech recognition entirely or so cripple the interface as to be useless for anything but direct text dictation in a very limited way. The current accessibility tool kits are replicating the same mistakes I've seen inaccessibility environments since I've been disabled. I think a better solution, is for the application to export the data and operations available via a GUI and accessibility tool to reveal all of its controls and data so that a customizable framework can drive both application and accessibility tool to provide the accessibility interface necessary for the user. the model I propose reduces the cost for an applications developer to provide accessibility, makes it possible to split boundaries between which machine has the accessibility device, and which machine has the application as well as applications within browsers. This model also makes accessibility cheaper, easier to validate, customize, and support than the current models. this is still theoretical as I don't have any hands with which to write code. I wouldn't turn away a volunteer to help me with making a prototype. the basic idea is sound enough that others I have bounced it off of think it's worth exploring. All I need is someone with hands. --- eric -- Ubuntu-accessibility mailing list Ubuntu-accessibility@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-accessibility
Re: Persona Survey results
On 8/30/2010 2:11 AM, Maurice McCarthy wrote: Thanks for that. It is a dud then. Maurice Not necessarily. Don't fall into the trap of thinking that the accessibility interface belongs on the same machine as the application. It would be possible to put a simple bridge on grub and have it speak to the second machine fully enabled. How you get there is a different story but something like serial port or equivalent might be sufficient. Machine with grub tells remote machine what to say. Remote machine babbles. This is a lot easier than loading up grub with a whole bunch of stuff 99% of the universe doesn't need. A small change is much more likely to be accepted. -- Ubuntu-accessibility mailing list Ubuntu-accessibility@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-accessibility
Re: Persona Survey results
On 8/21/2010 6:59 AM, Maurice McCarthy wrote: Hi All, I read the survey last night and it makes interesting reading. A few people mentioned Dragonsoft programs such as Naturally Speaking and Dictate. Forgive me if I am wrong but earlier this year I was looking at these sort of programs. Naturally Speaking has not undergone any development for over 2 years and is now half price in Amazon. When I also discovered that voice recognition is vastly improved in Windows 7 I leapt to the conclusion that Microsoft have bought Dragonsoft and incorporated their product into Windows. I may be wrong but this sort of thing has happened often - Roxio cd burner, Visio CAD and Winternals to name the obvious ones. NaturallySpeaking version 11 was just released. It has been improved but not in the ways that matters. It has a bunch of gui improvements, some speed and accuracy improvements. I can't find out if they've improved the number of a that controls it works with. I can almost guarantee you it does not work with any of the open source edit controls such as gtk+ or wxwindows. On the other hand, there's been a lot of activity in the wine community and I would not be surprised if this was the year we had a working solution. Windows speech recognition is completely separate from nuance. I've been told it's on par with NaturallySpeaking 10.1. Unfortunately, Microsoft is even less responsive to the needs of the disabled than nuance. Quite a pity. One of the Microsoft developers was hanging out on the voice coder list and helped out significantly with using Microsoft's speech recognition and then he vanished when we started asking questions, hard questions about bug fixes. We call this the I think I hear my mommy calling effect. Against my better nature I bought a copy of Win7 to see for myself and found nothing as good as this in Linux. Isn't it exhilarating When you find something nice (er) than what you've ever known and horrifying to realize you can never be satisfied with either environment. For example, I've been looking at a bunch of windows IDE's in the vain hope that I will find one that will work with NaturallySpeaking. But in my exposure to these different tools and user interfaces, I've come to find that I like some of them better than Emacs but they still fall short so I find myself stuck between modern Windows gui's and emacs and neither work with speech recognition. Isn't that exquisite? It makes me weep. -- Ubuntu-accessibility mailing list Ubuntu-accessibility@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-accessibility
Re: Persona Survey results
On 8/21/2010 6:59 AM, Maurice McCarthy wrote: Hi All, I read the survey last night and it makes interesting reading. A few people mentioned Dragonsoft programs such as Naturally Speaking and Dictate. Forgive me if I am wrong but earlier this year I was looking at these sort of programs. Naturally Speaking has not undergone any development for over 2 years and is now half price in Amazon. When I also discovered that voice recognition is vastly improved in Windows 7 I leapt to the conclusion that Microsoft have bought Dragonsoft and incorporated their product into Windows. I may be wrong but this sort of thing has happened often - Roxio cd burner, Visio CAD and Winternals to name the obvious ones. NaturallySpeaking version 11 was just released. It has been improved but not in the ways that matters. It has a bunch of gui improvements, some speed and accuracy improvements. I can't find out if they've improved the number of a that controls it works with. I can almost guarantee you it does not work with any of the open source edit controls such as gtk+ or wxwindows. On the other hand, there's been a lot of activity in the wine community and I would not be surprised if this was the year we had a working solution. Windows speech recognition is completely separate from nuance. I've been told it's on par with NaturallySpeaking 10.1. Unfortunately, Microsoft is even less responsive to the needs of the disabled than nuance. Quite a pity. One of the Microsoft developers was hanging out on the voice coder list and helped out significantly with using Microsoft's speech recognition and then he vanished when we started asking questions, hard questions about bug fixes. We call this the I think I hear my mommy calling effect. Against my better nature I bought a copy of Win7 to see for myself and found nothing as good as this in Linux. Isn't it exhilarating When you find something nice (er) than what you've ever known and horrifying to realize you can never be satisfied with either environment. For example, I've been looking at a bunch of windows IDE's in the vain hope that I will find one that will work with NaturallySpeaking. But in my exposure to these different tools and user interfaces, I've come to find that I like some of them better than Emacs but they still fall short so I find myself stuck between modern Windows gui's and emacs and neither work with speech recognition. Isn't that exquisite? It makes me weep. -- Ubuntu-accessibility mailing list Ubuntu-accessibility@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-accessibility
Re: Scheduling Our Next Meeting
On 6/24/2010 6:40 AM, Penelope Stowe wrote As it's time for us to think about our next meeting, I'd like to propose meeting June 30 at 21h UTC. Does this work for those interested? works here, -- Ubuntu-accessibility mailing list Ubuntu-accessibility@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-accessibility
Re: disabilities
On 5/24/2010 5:52 AM, Bruno Girin wrote: \ There are more than disabled people on standard committees than you think. In practice, the problem is not with web and accessibility standards themselves, they are with their implementation in browsers and how well (or not) they are followed by web site designers... this common experience is why I've come to the conclusion that are accessibility APIs and design models are fundamentally doomed to failure. Why? History. Also because anytime you expect somebody else to change something to accommodate you, they will not do it. Having been in the software biz, having run companies, I will tell you accessibility needs fall dead last both in terms of project and financial expenditures. They fall dead last because they do not add anything to the bottom-line. The number of disabled users of software is almost vanishingly small when compared to the larger market. http://www.practicalecommerce.com/articles/1417-Accessibility-How-Many-Disabled-Web-Users-Are-There- unfortunately, the article above doesn't deal with upper extremity disabilities like mine so one probably should assume the numbers given are the lower limit on disabled users. They estimate something like 7% of the population is disabled. That's on a par with number of Linux users and we see how well the marketplace accommodates TAB users who have disposable income in contrast to disabled users who have trouble finding jobs and have correspondingly less disposable income. I think the current models also doome because it puts the administrative load for accessibility on every system to disabled person uses. Further increasing cost for little benefit especially for employers which will probably never see a disabled person cross the threshold to apply for job let alone hold one.remember, 7% disabled in a total population approximately works out to something like one person in 20 to one person 30 in the actual working population. In my 30 year career, I'm the first, maybe second disabled person I've seen in any of the companies I worked for and these were not small companies. So, how do we change this? We changes by minimizing the changes necessary to applications and hopefully, embed them in libraries so they are used automatically without any work on the part of the developer. We built clients to handle the disability user interface and talk to the back doors in those libraries to do the disability work. We lower the costs/barrier to entry for employers and application developers alike and we end up with a greater range of applications that can be used. cultural and technical challenges discussed later if you care. It's true, as a person with no disability, it took me a long time to get it. And I don't think I completely get it yet but at least I'm now able to make a judgement call on whether some code uses techniques that are likely to cause accessibility issues. This is to be expected: it is extremely difficult for someone who does not have a given disability to understand what it is like to live with that disability. In fact, I suspect it is difficult for a blind person to understand the challenges faced by people with motor disabilities for instance. I'm puzzled by this. If you going to work with disability issues, one on handicap yourself in the same way. For example, gloves that restrict finger movement or induced pain when you touch something. Blind folds or having someone remove your keyboard, or worse, generate random keystrokes when you touch a key? I would think that a couple of days with nothing but speech recognition and the mouse would give you a feel for the panic the disabled user feels and a week might give you the first glimmers of understanding to how the solver is problems. A month, and you'll be one of us. :-) All this to say that to solve accessibility problems, we need to talk to each other and understand that getting it is very difficult for able people. Which means that able people need to be ready to listen and see their assumptions and cool ideas challenged; while disabled people need to be patient in explaining why a particular design doesn't work for them and suggesting constructive alternatives. good point. I will also add that patience runs out somewhere around 10 to 12 years of explaining to yet another generation of clueless programmers what's wrong with their approach and being told get off of your own fucking lawn grandpa, we know what we are doing only to see them crash, burn, and walk away saying that wasn't really an interesting problem after all. -- Ubuntu-accessibility mailing list Ubuntu-accessibility@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-accessibility
Re: Ubuntu-accessibility Digest, Vol 54, Issue 23
On 5/24/2010 6:46 AM, Kenny Hitt wrote: Hi. Just to clarify something: my attitude isn't directed at any of the people who have asked me questions about my Orca crash. My attitude comes from the fact I can debug Linux kernel code but can't debug a fucking gnome screen reader. In my opinion, switching to Python from C was a mistake for a screen reader. just a side note we may want to talk about a different thread. I really like Python because, if I control how names are formatted, I can write Python code with a small number of macros. Editing is a bit of a bitch because I don't have the right feedback from Emacs (fookin OSS purists getting in the way). Unfortunately, most Python code from tabs has pep-8 formatted names which totally screws up speech recognition accessibility. Sometimes I take the code and use a global search and replace to create accessible code. :-) -- Ubuntu-accessibility mailing list Ubuntu-accessibility@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-accessibility
Re: VEDICS Speech Assistant
On 5/23/2010 2:49 AM, Tim Cross wrote: while I can appreciate the frustration you express in your posts, I have to agree with Kenny on this one. Your points regarding history being repeated etc mayb e valid. However, you made no reference to any of the points you later expanded upon in your original post. As Kenny points out, you didn't even acknowledge what the OP stated as the limitations in their system. I suspect you didn't even look into it any further than that simple introductory post. Your response was flippent and negative. Yes, I accept your correction. I was being flippant and negative. I am extremely frustrated by developers who do not ask the users what they need. I don't mean short-term users but, people who have been in a particular field for a long time. In my sarcasm, I did acknowledge the limitations and the type of limitations. Problem being that you had to understand and know the types of systems, the limitations, and the tasks users need to perform in order understand sarcasm. This also points to another problem in the disability community, a lack of knowledge of necessary components. The issues you raise are real and complex. They are going to be difficult to resolve and ther are almost certainly going to be many failures before we have some success. I suspect you are correct in that many with the technical skills don't understand the underlying issues well and frustratingly, we are destined to see the same mistakes being made. I believe this is because the problem is generally not well understood and as a consequnce, the outcomes are less than we would hope. However, I also feel that this is part of the process and it very much mirrors developments in other areas. Frequently, we learn more from our failures than we do from our successes. A frustrating part of software development is that, unlike the real sciences, we don't document and publish our failures. If we did, maybe the forward progress would be better. I spent 18 years as a software developer before my hands went pop. I've since then spent 15+ years as an analyst/designer. The points you made are true for the coder world. There is very little knowledge of what has gone before, or whether professionals or do. But if you spend a few hours a month reading research papers on what people are doing with software development and especially the psychology of software development, you could learn some amazing things. I particularly loved software practice and experience. I don't know if it's still a good given the current model of no editing, no vetting, publish on the net culture of today but, it's worth a shot. The ACM has some good journals as well. Point being, you don't have to make the same mistakes. You can learn from others and make different mistakes. I'm not seeing different mistakes being made here. I would be much more supportive if I was. I also disagree with the view/belief that ignorance of history always means that the same mistakes are just repeated. Sometimes, ignorance of history results in fresh new approaches that find a solution. In some cases, awareness of history can have negative impact as well. It tends to constrain/define the approaches taken. In computing in particular, there have been a number of great advances made by people who did not come from a computing background, who were not aware of past history and attempts. In some cases, they did things that those who were more aware of the past and informed about the technology had already discounted because of their past experiences or because of theoretical limitations. In fact, this is a frequent pattern in many areas. Consider where we would be now if the Wright brothers had just looked at the past history of our attempts to fly! I know I sound like an ass by continually disagreeing but, the Wright brothers were aware of the history of other flyers. They knew you needed to make a lightweight motor and have a certain amount of lift . They chose Kitty Hawk for the steady laminar flow winds and the landscape. they also lifted a lot of work from Otto Lilienthal http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otto_Lilienthal You'll notice that his work was well documented and repeatable so you could always build a wing that glided consistently. In any case, your point is made and wonderfully highlighted the absolutely unprofessional and unacceptable shortcomings of the software development arena. We should be aware of past history and we should try to learn from it. However, we also need to be balanced and sometimes, we just need to have a go. We may well fail, thats not the issue. What we need to do is pick ourselves up again after the failure, learn fromt he experiences and try again. My original background was astronomy and physics. One thing that was apparent once I got into the experimental portion was that you replicate a mistake to understand the mistake and then you go to make a new mistake
Re: Ubuntu-accessibility Digest, Vol 54, Issue 23
On 5/23/2010 11:26 AM, Kenny Hitt wrote: There isn't a kernel module in this case since they are using sane. I regularly build and install kernel modules without needing to reboot. Maybe these notes were for Windows? That is the only explanation I can come up with to explain this. I went and read which reveals that is a Linux solution. I have observed that scanner interfaces are, fragile at best, and I'm not surprised they want to reboot with the device turned on. Fortunately for me, I don't need this app since I already have a functional ocr solution . in Linux. My solution involves a few shell commands. It seems much simpler than this app in any case. from reading the documentation, this application looks very simple and it is aimed at visually impaired users. if you can use a keyboard, this shouldn't be a problem. As for a few shell commands, that's a reasonably inaccessible especially from speech recognition. Shell commands fail accessibility for a couple reasons. First the discoverability. You have to know that command exists in order to find out what it does unless you happen to remember it. I think I know of about 30 commands in the shell environment and I need to look at the man pages on 28 of them but I do anything more than the basics. Yet there are hundreds of shell commands that will probably do what I need except, I don't know they exist and I don't know what they do. The second way they fail is presentation. The name of the command, how it's invoked etc. it is not accessible either to speech recognition or text-to-speech. The last one, text-to-speech, may do a more credible job at presenting garbled text (command names, commandline arguments etc.) than speech recognition will when generating the same. You are correct however that once you have a CLI idiom memorized it does become easier to use because you associate a concept with a more complicated structure and then just use the concept as shorthand for that structure. --- eric -- Ubuntu-accessibility mailing list Ubuntu-accessibility@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-accessibility
Re: Ubuntu-accessibility Digest, Vol 54, Issue 23
On 5/23/2010 12:40 PM, Kenny Hitt wrote: On Sun, May 23, 2010 at 12:16:12PM -0400, Eric S. Johansson wrote: On 5/23/2010 11:26 AM, Kenny Hitt wrote: There isn't a kernel module in this case since they are using sane. I regularly build and install kernel modules without needing to reboot. Maybe these notes were for Windows? That is the only explanation I can come up with to explain this. I went and read which reveals that is a Linux solution. I have observed that scanner interfaces are, fragile at best, and I'm not surprised they want to reboot with the device turned on. I just switched scanners yesterday with no need to reboot. That idea about scanners doesn't match with my experience in Linux. fair enough. I don't use scanners except for one and that's under Windows because I haven't had time to set up on my wife's machine. (Yes, her Facebook workstation is the house linux box unless you count the mini ITX system running virtual machines for my firewall and internal print services. Yes, let's not count that :-) Since I'm totally blind, that means I'm likely supposed to be one of the users of this product. Since I have years of Linux experience, I don't have much confidence in any app that tells me I need to reboot after installing a user space app. really good point. And I'm glad to hear you talk about your experiences. We need more user stories to help extract a better than the current model for accessibility. This is really great. I find I'm still faster and more productive in the text console at a bash prompt than I've ever been in a GUI like Gnome. Gnome has never been stable or reliable enough for me to stick with it for more than a few months at a time. I had 4 years of Windows experience and was one of the early adopters of Gnome accessibility, but Gnome hasn't lived up to it's marketing. right. That makes sense. What I'm hearing from your experience is that you build a mental model of all the commands, you can type them in and get feedback through text-to-speech or a braille output device to confirm that you entered the right data. The unpronounceable nature of the commandline doesn't bother you??? Is that right? I think the big problem with putting accessibility features for blind users on a GUI is that you try to map a two-dimensional shallow but wide user interface into an aural format. similar problem to what we deal with speech recognition. The second way they fail is presentation. The name of the command, how it's invoked etc. it is not accessible either to speech recognition or text-to-speech. The last one, text-to-speech, may do a more credible job at presenting garbled text (command names, commandline arguments etc.) than speech recognition will when generating the same. I don't follow this one. help $command works for me with a screen reader any time I need a reminder of a built in command $command --help works when I need a reminder for an external command. Okay. I was channeling from too deep inside my head on the theory behind accessibility. Sorry about that cp -al [UcWd]* . How do you pronounce that? In simplest form, its Charlie papa space minus sign space left bracket cap uniform charlie cap whiskey delta close bracket no space asterisk space dot ugly as hell and rife with potential for speech recognition errors which makes it even harder to speak! If I was to make a little smarter using some macro capability it might be something like: Copy with links source pattern cap uniform charlie cap whiskey delta close with wildcard destination there (memorized target location) little more verbose but, far more resilient against speech recognition errors. It's also form one could translate command into for a text-to-speech user. The downside with this model is that you need to create special macros for every stupid command and work out the appropriate argument handling grammar. fortunately, I think there's a better way I like to see other ideas if people have them. -- Ubuntu-accessibility mailing list Ubuntu-accessibility@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-accessibility
Re: VEDICS Speech Assistant
On 5/21/2010 11:04 AM, Nischal Rao wrote: Hi, I and some of my friends have created a speech assistant software for linux called VEDICS(Voice Enabled Desktop Interaction and Control System). Using this software the user can access any element found on the user's screen through speech. The user can also navigate the filesystem through speech. We have created some demo screencasts of the software: 1. Accessing the gnome panel and application. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WrVaJXtv0WU 2. Changing the theme and background. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zRgX94qGj3g 3. Navigating directories and playing songs: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kVQwAoeIavk 4. Running a slide show: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JtzA8TFwvuI 5. Running default applications and window operations: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iCEANbu8p50 6. Stopping and starting vedics: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TLFtdrlt3lM 7. Creating and deleting files: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_3CFAl22h2o 8. Navigating links: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AufBaaJazKU Currently the software doesn't support the dictation facility. However, we are planning to add this feature in the future. The best part of this software is that it is speaker independent, no training is required and it can recognize words not present in the English dictionary. Currently it works well on ubuntu 9.10 and ubuntu 10.04 You can find the source code at : http://sourceforge.net/projects/vedics/ very nice. have you thrown away your keyboard yet? please do so and send a message to the list without keyboard. -- Ubuntu-accessibility mailing list Ubuntu-accessibility@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-accessibility
ideological speed bumps
I've had this conversation with a couple of OSS developers and the answers always leave me very uncomfortable. The problem is how does one live by OSS principals when essential tools are vehemently closed and the barriers to replacements are decade scale and no one is working on them? The problem I refer to is the use of speech recognition as a tool for dealing with upper extremity disabilities. There is only one vendor for continuous speech large vocabulary recognition. There is maybe one or two universities in the world conducting research into speech recognition. All the open-source toolkits are hampered by design criteria (fixed grammar small vocabulary) and there is no corpus sufficient to build acoustical models. Recognition engines are multimillion dollar efforts to build and corpus collection is even more expensive. Speech recognition also requires very specialized knowledge and the people skilled in the art are owned by industry. Therefore, if a rational person would assume that OSS speech recognition is not coming anytime in the near future, maybe not even in my lifetime. A rational person would also assume that part of the way to tackle the problem is to nibble at the edges from the application side to the recognizer side, gradually increasing the availability of OSS components so that the disabled person can minimize their dependence on proprietary or closed source applications. A lot of us disabled programmers have done a good job the nibbling around the edges but there's a lot of cases where we don't have the knowledge and need the help of project related people for example, Emacs integration mode with NaturallySpeaking (VR-mode) doesn't work right. It is incredibly fragile and breaks apparently at random. When I asked for help from various Emacs wizards to help keep it up-to-date and maybe even integrated into Emacs source in the hopes that it would be less likely to break, I was told there was no chance of help because it was linked to a proprietary package. That doesn't leave us in a very good place because if that attitude persists from the ideologically pure, disable users have a shrinking number of open-source applications they can use because, the users require the use of a proprietary package. How does one deal with the real world issue that disabled users will need proprietary packages integrated with open source applications to keep them from being forced into using 100% proprietary applications with no options? -- Ubuntu-accessibility mailing list Ubuntu-accessibility@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-accessibility
Re: ideological speed bumps
On 5/15/2010 8:59 PM, Tim Cross wrote: Hi Eric, the points you raise and your observations are all true, but I don't think there is a good answer. What it really boils down to is that OSS is largely about solutions that have been developed by users scratching their own itch. Unfortunately, voice recognition is an extremely complex and difficult to scratch itch and the number of developers with the necessary skills that want to scratch it is very small. thanks for a great series responses to a complex question. As for scratching your own it, there's one big difference. I can't scratch my own itch because my hands don't work right. It's roughly the same problem as telling a blind person that they can write their own code in an IDE that has lots of wonderful graphical images that tell you what you need to do... whoops It has been a umber of years since I've looked at the status of voice recognition in the OSS world. Working on these projects would seem to be a good proactive approach. In addition to this, two other approaches that might be worth pursuing, especially by anyone who is interested in this area and doesn't feel they have the technical skill to actually work in the development area, would be to lobby commercial vendors to either make some of their code open source or to provide low cost licenses and to lobby for project funding to support OSS projects that are working on VR. A significant amount of the work done to improve TTS interfaces has been made possible because of effective loggying and gaining of support from commercial and government bodies. The vast majority of the speech recognition efforts today are for IVR, interactive voice response systems such as those you would ask. Weather in Boston and get a text-to-speech response like the weather in Boston is hostile to out-of-towners and not very kind to locals either The difference between speech recognition and text-to-speech today is that usable text-to-speech is easy to create with a team of grad students. Speech recognition takes generations of grad students. Witness how little progress has been made on the Sphinx toolkit's since its creation. We have three different engines all with different characteristics but all on the same problem space. We don't have proper acoustic modeling. We don't have proper language modeling etc. etc. I know I'm being a broken record but, these are huge obstacles to general-purpose use. I would love to see us license for little or no money the nuance NaturallySpeaking toolkit for purposes of developing accessibility interfaces. I can't even get them to return a phone call what I'm calling about a commercial application. If it's for accessibility, they don't even pick up the phone. This tells me it may be time for some guerrilla action. If someone has a spare $2000, I have a scanner and I'm sure we can find some good friends in Europe and Japan. not that I'm saying or even suggesting we should violate nuanc's copyright of course because that would be as wrong as denying disabled people information they need to make themselves more independent and increasing their prospects for working. I'm possibly a little more optimistic regarding the future of OSS VR. Voice recognition is rapidly moving from living in a very specialised domain to being much more general purpose. This is largely due to the growth in small form factor devices, such as mobile phones. I've been told that the Google Nexus 1 phone has quite good VR support. This is an indication that decent VR applications that run in an OSS environment are becoming more prevalent. here's a dirty little secret. They didn't do the speech recognition in the phone. Not enough horsepower or memory space for vocabularies. They ship the audio to a server which then does speech recognition not real-time and shoves the text back to the cell phone. this may unfortunately be our future for disability use. We'll no longer have control over speech recognition engines but instead rent recognition time off the cloud. I really hate the cloud. I understand why pilots hate them as well because if you fly to the big fluffy thing, the fluffy soft thing can turn really really hard as you run into a mountain hidden within the cloud. boink! I'm wait for the equivalent to happen in the software cloud world. It is also likely as demand increases for VR solutions that more University research will occur as it will be seen as something with good commercial potential i.e. good funding opportunities. Speech recognition research is aimed at IVR. Funding has plateaued or even dropped because recognition accuracy is not improving. The techniques have run out of steam. It will take a radically new approach to put any fire under speech recognition again. Sometimes I think the only way nuance is improving NaturallySpeaking is by fixing bugs. I doubt there's no new technology going on inside.
user interface animations Re: Next Meeting **Revised Date**: May 6 2010 10:00 UTC
On 5/3/2010 2:23 PM, Phillip Whiteside wrote: Hi, not sure I understand, do you want something like a slide-presentations (power-point style) as done on these https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UbuntuDeveloperWeek or a screen cast such as http://lubuntu.net/node/32? If it is the latter, I will ask leszek if he could spare some time to help you. If it is the former, I will make some further enquiries The end result I want is an animated sequence intermixing audio and graphics representing a user interface and its operation. F take a simple example of changing a directory. For the most part, the is an open loop system where you have the grammar of cd dir And dir is just a list of names. Usually static or, at best customized by the developer on each machine. This sucks. open a terminal window Try push to observe: sidebar with last 10 reference directories on-screen. Push to 10 The 10th item on the list is used to execute a pushd command and some marker is left on the screen somewhere indicating it's been pushed. Maybe a [dir] in the title bar. But what if you didn't want one of the 10 on the first list. You want something from the most frequently used list Go frequently used and the sidebar indication would change to list of most frequently used directories. One could also search so with something like Name starts with albc a search box would open up on top of the sidebar and you could edit by voice or by hand search box. However, at no point the user interface give you any capability whatsoever to do anything by hand other than the simple editing feature. Everything must be driven by voice As you can see, this is a moderately complex user interaction that should be simpler when presented visually and by request for a helpful animator. Things get more complicated why start talking about the enhanced dictation box I've been pushing for a couple of years. It's probably the best solution available for bridging between NaturallySpeaking and Linux. I advocate for the solution because I do not believe it is possible for the open-source community to come up with a workable speech recognition solution by the time I die. I would like to spend the next 15 years of my life being effective, working with speech recognition to make money, so I can write, and so I can have a comfortable life. I want to make programming by voice work far better than we've done so far. Enhanced dictation box is core to my ideas on that topic. But, enhanced dictation box is a simple complicated idea that needs animation to make the concept accessible to many people. now that I'm already wound up on the topic. :-) Enhanced dictation box is the same as the regular dictation box with four major differences. 1) user definable cut and paste sequences (mouse control, keystroke sequences) etc. 2) persistence. Does not go away until you tell it to. Implies one copy per active application but active dictation box matches window focus 3) internal log/journaling system. Can't lose data, cannot figure out what you said 4) input and output transformations. After you grab data, and transform it into some speech recognition friendly form. When you paste it, the data returns to the speech recognition hostile form If one is truly clever, the application we split into two parts. The first part is the user interface. Light, fast, doesn't degrade recognition. The second part talks to the first part by the net which means that do not need to be on the same machine. Do it right and you can dictate on Windows or wine and have your results show up in Linux. Not that difficult to build if you have hands but potentially extremely useful. Regards, Phill. On Mon, May 3, 2010 at 6:06 PM, Eric S. Johansson e...@harvee.org mailto:e...@harvee.org wrote: On 5/3/2010 12:59 PM, Penelope Stowe wrote: The meeting will be in #ubuntu-accessibility. And for the person who asked, yes, that's 6AM EDT in the US. I know it's really early, but last time most of the people at the meeting were in the UK/Europe and also due to my work schedule this week, I needed to hold an early meeting. Please let me know if you have any further questions! I could use a graphics person with some animation knowledge. I've been advocating a tool and a new form of user interface to make speech user interface is far more practical and discoverable. Obviously my mouse hand is on the fritz and, well speech just as the wrong tool for creating graphics. I could really use the help with this because I believe that these user interface models or something derived from them would be the next step in a better direction for us. Everyone I've given the whiteboard talk to really loves it but fuzzy whiteboard and me waving my hands around just doesn't translate to the Internet. :-) --- eric -- Ubuntu
Re: Can pulseaudio be made to work with consoles and Orca at the same time?
On 1/1/2010 7:07 AM, Bill Cox wrote: Any basically usable Linux system for the blind needs Orca and speakup working together. Pulseaudio, SFAIK, only allows one instance to use the sound card at a time. Pulseaudio also requires each user to have his own copy. Speakup runs before any user logs in, and therefore must run as it's own user. Therefore... pulseaudio can't work on any truely accessible Linux box? Is this basically true? If this can be fixed, which peice of code needs fixing (I'm willing to fix it)? Should we try and make multiple instances of pulseaudio play nice together so they can share the sound card? I will admit I haven't played with this lately that was a problem as of a few months ago. Specifically using multiple sound devices with speech recognition (or any other app requiring audio input such as a telephone. For some reason, Lennox audio systems don't seem to cope very well with a USB microphone because instead of letting it stand as a second device, it seems to displace the primary audio device in favor of a USB device and not leave the application which one it wants to use. My favorite use case is using a headset to speak with someone (voip) while running rhythm box playing some tunes in the background. For voip, you can also substitute wine running NaturallySpeaking. in any case, I think is a generic problem dealing with multiple devices and if you can fix it, that would be fantastic. -- Ubuntu-accessibility mailing list Ubuntu-accessibility@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-accessibility
Re: pulseaudio problems again
Halim Sahin wrote: Hi Eric, Can you please explain why we need a new audio system and not using alsa directly??? because Alsa is broken. It does not work well with wine. It does not work well with USB microphones for speech recognition. It does not support two sound devices at the same time. For example, I listen to Pandora on my laptop soundcard and I use speech recognition with my USB headset. Windows it mostly works. Linux, it bites If you want to use a soundserver why not jack or esd? why was pulse audio built instead of using them? Ego? Cluelessness? It's really difficult to understand why ubuntu's audiosystem is broken for people with disabliilities since 7.10. this doesn't need money. This need only the use of stable software. (pa isn't stable yet). There isn't any stable audio software. It's all broken from a USB, multiple source perspective. the money is to pay somebody to write code to fix the glaring bugs, architectural faults, and missing device drivers. What about the working console setup? All console screenreaders can't use the audio system when pa starts in desktop session. Another example of brokenness. Audio developers are not thinking through the use cases properly. -- Ubuntu-accessibility mailing list Ubuntu-accessibility@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-accessibility
Re: pulseaudio problems again
Halim Sahin wrote: I can listen to anything and use my usb logitech headset for voip conferencing. Maybe your problems are configuration mistakes? could be but I've never found anyone that can tell me how to fix it. the last time I tried, the usb device (iMic, buddy, and vxi b200) overrode the primary sound device. last round with the vxi, someone from the alsa group admitted that the driver for the b200 was inadequate. It will be interesting how pulseaudio can give more stability if the layer (alsa) is broken. With broken alsa drivers you can't get more stability. for usb devices? yup. that is why folks should pick one interface and *make it work* BTW. I am using alsa about 10 years and had no problem with it. I am using voip with my usb logitech head set (twinkle) without problems. great but audio quality probably isn't up to speech recognition standards. we can be quite the pain in the butt about that. :-) -- Ubuntu-accessibility mailing list Ubuntu-accessibility@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-accessibility
Re: Promoting idea of getting Ubuntu to adapt to users' accessibility preferences...
Brian Cameron wrote: This does seem like an interesting idea. To expand upon it, I think GNOME also needs a solution that works more generally. There has been talk of enhancing gnome-settings-daemon so that it is possible for users to hit particular keybindings or other sorts of gestures (e.g. mouse gestures) to launch AT programs. This would allow a user to launch the on-screen-keyboard, text-to-speech, or magnifier by completing the appropriate gesture (e.g. keypress or mouse gesture). I would think that using a specific smart card or USB stick is another form of gesture that would also be good for launching AT programs. However, wouldn't it be better to come up with a solution that would support all of these sorts of gestures in one place? Providing a solution that can recognize different sorts of gestures (perhaps configurable so users can define their own sorts of gestures - perhaps with other unique hardware based solutions - like pressing a button on their braille display) seems a way to go about implementing your idea and also supporting other mechanisms that could be used to launch AT programs as needed. as I added as a counter proposal It is unrealistic to expect all machines a user uses to have accessibility software. There may be multiple reasons for this ranging from administrative overhead to licensing issues to interference with normal operation. By adopting the perspective that the user interface moves with the user and not the machine opens up new possibilities for widely available accessibility. By associating the user interface software (speech recognition, text-to-speech, various dog and pony tricks, etc.), the impact on the general machine is lessened, and administrative costs are lowered, licensing issues are reduced or eliminated, and the user has increased control over the software they need to function. This can be implemented today using virtual machine technology and relatively minimal bridge software making the accessibility software interface visible on the host and enabling interaction between the application and the accessibility software. The Web for all model doesn't address something I consider fundamental flaw of accessibility technology. I should be able to use any machine I have access to. I shouldn't have to wait for an administrator or buy new license just because I'm using a new machine whether it be for a lifetime or just a few minutes. I should be able to plug-in, click a few icons and start working. After all, that's what keyboard and mouse allow tabs to do. Why put any further barriers disabled people? I believe the future of accessibility will start with putting accessibility tools on a netbook and connecting that network to other systems on demand. I believe this because if you give me an accessibility interface, you control how I use the computer. If you give me an API, and a remote accessibility toolkit, I can control how I use any computer. Yes, I'm a wee bit cranky about this because I spent the past 15 years watching speech driven user interfaces get almost no support and I am seeing speech recognition on Linux (NaturallySpeaking on wine) sit at the cusp of being useful by disabled people and getting no traction with the developer community. -- Ubuntu-accessibility mailing list Ubuntu-accessibility@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-accessibility
Re: Cygwin / Dragon / SAPI / Linux
Thomas Lloyd wrote: Hi, Not sure if you have tried Cygwin but that does allow you to open both a full gnome desktop and individual applications within windows and in theory should allow you to control the system remotely over ssh via Dragon. You can run the system full screen and you would not know that you were even using a windows system. If you would like further information let me know as i have worked quite extensively on such setups. gack. have I ever told you just how badly cygwin and I get along? The past three times I installed it, if those my XP environment so badly I had to reinstall... everything I guess another option would be to use the Ubuntu Windows Linux merge. I think I'm reluctant to use these to because Windows always degrades for me. I might be able to keep her from degrading if I don't run any applications on Windows except the bare minimum but, it always degrades. I liked the purity of running limits as my host. It always feels like home and like its the system I should be using at a deep and fundamental emotional level. I cannot emphasize enough how much it feels like my computer spiritual philosophical home. but, as I often say, functionality trumps politics so I should drag out a 250 GB laptop drive and start hacking away. Two guiding questions. I want to keep all of my data on a separate filesystem/partition. If I'm not using Windows applications for anything, is it possible to do this? can I run Thunderbird under cygwin? can I have a separate partition running ext4 or nilfs? I suspect these two are true with ubuntu windows merge Can I run a virtual machine in addition to cygwin/uwm? Kennedy was all on Windows 7 because of lost a Windows XP disc with sata drivers as well as my video drivers and my WebCam drivers etc. etc. (God, I thought linux aged poorly with regards to drivers. You have no idea how good it is in comparison to Windows) . As a side note i have been integrating the Microsoft SAPI interface into Linux and have been mainly concentrating on text to speech but there is the speech to text interface that I have tested but not yet done any work on. I see that Dragon also has the potential to have such an interface developed in the same fashion that I have created for SAPI. I have quite a large amount of experience and as along as we can get the bare minimum components of Dragon running under Wine your away. I could do with a sneak peak at the details on the Dragon scripting interface to see if it supports COM automation under windows. If so it will be more straight forward for me. don't bother listing interface. (I think) take a look at natlink and dragonfly. natlink is a low-level exporting of some Dragon interfaces into Python. Dragonfly places a higher Lowell wrapper around these interfaces and makes it easier to work with the terms of grammar and action code. For what it's worth, people using these easy interfaces to speech recognition are almost universally Python driven in part because you can write Python code using speech recognition with relatively small modifications to your environment. It's not very efficient but, it is possible http://code.google.com/p/dragonfly/ will get you started in the right direction with all components I have a little bit of experience of the SAPI speech recognition system and never rated it really, that is why i have left it alone till now. Anyone who has experience of it can let me know otherwise. We can help you find people with experience. Whether they will talk to me is quite another story. :-) but we will do a weekend. I would love someone with experience of the Vista SDK to come on board and help me suck out the SAPI 5.3 components to see if we can get them running under wine. Any volunteers? This is going to be a problem. Microsoft just cut back on their speech recognition group if rumor a thing). We might feel the find some of the people on the street and they might be a let help so, again we'll take a look. -- Ubuntu-accessibility mailing list Ubuntu-accessibility@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-accessibility
Re: Cygwin / Dragon / SAPI / Linux
Bill Cox wrote: The thought of getting Naturally speaking working with Linux is very exciting, and I may be able to put in some hours on the Linux side. From what I've read, it's possible to get NS Professional working with the built-in text editor, but you can't get text to focus on any Linux app. Getting that working would be huge. well, we have a bunch of work in wine and audio that needs help I've possibly solved the problem with the cross environment boundary. when i get back from a client site i'll try to write it up -- Ubuntu-accessibility mailing list Ubuntu-accessibility@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-accessibility
Re: Future of accessibility under Ubuntu
Bill Cox wrote: If Canonical cares about support for the visually impaired, then it may be time to mount a significant effort to put out this fire. On every blog I'm reading, the visually impaired are recommending that users switch away from Ubuntu. I am currently running Orca and Ubuntu 9.04, and I have to offer that same advice. It's more than just removing pulseaudio. I've hacked problems for a week straight, and Orca is still not functioning properly. There are at least a dozen major problems, and not all of them have work-arounds yet. Clearly there was zero testing of Orca for 9.04. I hope you do not consider me root for pointing out the accessibility doesn't stop with the blind. As much as you may be dependent on text-to-speech, I am extremely dependent on speech to text (i.e. speech recognition). Naturally speaking kind of works under wine and it really needs some dedicated effort/money/something to get it to the point where we can dictate into any of the next application. I have some ideas on how to bridge that gap but first we need a stable NaturallySpeaking. current open source speech recognition systems are a waste of time and money. They are the wrong tool for the application, says the man with 15 years experience using speech recognition. -- Ubuntu-accessibility mailing list Ubuntu-accessibility@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-accessibility
Re: Future of accessibility under Ubuntu
What can be done to make accessibility work more accessible? :-) well, it would really really help if you, or someone just like you could make NaturallySpeaking completely reliable under wine. Then we could examine usability issues around transferring the dictation results into Linux applications. I've become a fan of a dictation box variation for this purpose. Another thing, accessibility projects could do because language developers won't is building a smart framework for programming by voice. It's not pretty what we have out there today (a collection of circus tricks) and it would be nice to change things. -- Ubuntu-accessibility mailing list Ubuntu-accessibility@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-accessibility
Re: Jaunty -RT testing
Joseph Reagle wrote: As an aside, while I wasn't comfortable with with Jaunty RT oddness, I don't think NaturallySpeaking in a VirtualBox Machine requires RT, just low-latency. So I actually tried Intrepid again and built a kernel [1] with the following settings. I'm also using the new vbox 2.2b1 [2] -- with much improved USB performance -- and things seem quite good. interesting. 2.2 Beta one with the standard kernel of 8.10 gives me choppy audio. I've put a note on the mailing list about this and offer to try and help gather some information to figure out what's wrong. I wonder if a different scheduler might help. -- Ubuntu-Studio-users mailing list Ubuntu-Studio-users@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-studio-users
Re: Microsoft Speech Recognition / COM interfaces
Tom Lloyd wrote: Is there any millage in using the Microsoft speech recognition engine. I have no experience of using it but I can create the bridge from wine to linux. I havealready created the Text to speech element that now works in linux using Orca and speech dispatcher. It works quite nicely and i have had the speech recognition working but not trained it etc or really tried it for performance. Possibly if there is a com method for interfacing into Dragon Naturally Speaking like SAPI then it will work as well. This method can work I am mid writing this up at the moment and doing the first release of the project so if people are interested you have to bear with me.. I believe it uses sapi and I suggest you take a look at the natlink project. It exports an interface to Dragon which I think is COM. here are two different implementations (as far as I know) from original code base. http://sourceforge.net/projects/natlink/ http://www.westga.edu/~drocco/voice/NatLink/ -- Ubuntu-accessibility mailing list Ubuntu-accessibility@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-accessibility
Re: dictation
Angelo Marra wrote: Hi folks How hobout bulding a dictation Sofware for ubuntu? WE need it! QUOTE from the net: * TheMuso's blog http://www.themuso.com/blogs/TheMuso Voce Dictation http://www.themuso.com/blogs/TheMusoUbuntu_Accessibility_Part_4_future_Ubuntu_Accessibility#comment-13 Submitted by NathanDBB (not verified) on Wed, 11/28/2007 - 05:05. Many people who use Linux are spending 10+ hours in front of their computers each day. Because of this, many of us have typing-related hand damage. While I don't expect to be able to use the command line with voice, I should be able to write email and use a mouse-grid. Ubuntu _needs_ voice dictation software. We have not even started down the LONG ROAD to having free voice software. We have a couple of speech-to-text engines, but we don't have a good large vocabulary to work with. This Wiki page talks about getting the collection of this vocabulary started, but NOTHING has happened. https://wiki.ubuntu.com/SpeechRecognition As you point out, we need voice tools if we are going to get into mainstream corporate and government desktops. If we are are going to be an alternative to MS Vista in these markets, speech-to-text is MORE IMPORTANT then 3d desktops. I totally agree! What do tou think? as a long-term user of speech recognition, I too long for speech recognition on Linux. A friend of mine, Susan Cragin, is the lead QA person for naturally speaking on wine. She has reported that if you use NaturallySpeaking 10 plus the latest bleeding edge wine, on the Jaunty Alpha's, NaturallySpeaking works for about 13 minutes before croaking. However, dictation on the wine environment alone is not useful. We need a gateway to communicate from NaturallySpeaking in wine to Linux applications. I've proposed using an enhancement of the NaturallySpeaking dictation box as a preferred user interface with dealing with remote applications. Over the past 15 years, I've seen almost no progress in speech enabling applications. It's hard work, it changes every time the application changes and, quite frankly it's almost completely a dead loss in terms of effort. Getting an OS to use a common code base for automatic speech recognition is almost as completely fruitless as tweaking applications. Why? Because if it was possible or valued, it would have been done by now. So, the only way to handle this is to use a different user interface model and one possibility is the dictation box cut and paste model. ---eric -- Ubuntu-accessibility mailing list Ubuntu-accessibility@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-accessibility
Re: New developer
Tom Lloyd wrote: Hello All, Just wanted to say Hi and to get myself known. I have been using Ubuntu for= three or so years. I am a 26 year old developer from the UK trained in Emb= edded / Realtime systems. As a side project I am intergrating SAPI into Ubu= ntu to gives access to the MS speech engines using speech dispatcher. I use compiz for zoon, so i could be intrested in working to improve speech= and magnification under ubuntu, suggestions for projects welcome.=20 Look forward to joining in. it would be nice if you could help out on the other side of the house (speech recognition) too. Naturally speaking 10 works reasonably well under wine and we need some people with working hands to help out with the software bridging from the wine environment to the Linux environment. -- Ubuntu-accessibility mailing list Ubuntu-accessibility@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-accessibility
support for speech recognition
NaturallySpeaking 10 is working reasonably well under wine (if you use the bleeding edge git code). I have some ideas on how to bridge the barrier between linux and wine but I'd like to learn what facilities are native in the current gnome accessibility toolkit. The last time I read the documentation, it was almost entirely focused on the visually impaired. If I've misinterpreted the documentation, I'd like to learn where I went wrong. Thanks ---eric -- Ubuntu-accessibility mailing list Ubuntu-accessibility@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-accessibility
[Bug 191776] Re: Shutdown guest using the VI Client with VMware ESX 3.0.2 doesn't work
the problem with the VM ware tools package is that it's missing some very important components, specifically: poweroff-vm-default resume-vm-default poweron-vm-default suspend-vm-default there may be something else missing for invoking the scripts but, I haven't figured out what it is yet. without these scripts in place one should not use Ubuntu as a virtual machine because there is no way to cleanly shutdown a virtual machine when the host is shutting down. I view this as a critical problem especially if you hope to use 8.04 as a virtual server. fixing this problem shouldn't be too hard as the current code base of open-VM-tools has what is needed. -- Shutdown guest using the VI Client with VMware ESX 3.0.2 doesn't work https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/191776 You received this bug notification because you are a member of Ubuntu Bugs, which is subscribed to Ubuntu. -- ubuntu-bugs mailing list ubuntu-bugs@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-bugs
[Bug 191776] Re: Shutdown guest using the VI Client with VMware ESX 3.0.2 doesn't work
according to the documentation on the open-VM-tools website, the four default files listed above should be placed into /etc/vmware-tools with the execute bit turned on (555 seems to work). Initial, admittedly very brief testing reset and suspend appear to work. What's still missing is the VM Ware automatic cursor grab and release functionality. When you try to use the VM Ware workstation console, the mouse is grabbed until you hit ctrl-alt to release it. Full vmware tools should not demonstrate this problem. -- Shutdown guest using the VI Client with VMware ESX 3.0.2 doesn't work https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/191776 You received this bug notification because you are a member of Ubuntu Bugs, which is subscribed to Ubuntu. -- ubuntu-bugs mailing list ubuntu-bugs@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-bugs
[Bug 92408] Re: X11 does not support laptop lcd native resolution
my deepest apologies for not responding sooner. Had significant household crises. Yes, new driver does work, it looks really good. Display is clean and clear now if I could only fix the power supply I would be a happy camper. :-) -- X11 does not support laptop lcd native resolution https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/92408 You received this bug notification because you are a member of Ubuntu Bugs, which is the bug contact for Ubuntu. -- ubuntu-bugs mailing list ubuntu-bugs@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-bugs
Re: [Bug 24184] Re: Samba and system passwords should be synchronized.
Huygens wrote: Thank you Eric for your work :-) that is a nice initiative. Glad to be of help. I'm also making trouble in the anti-spam (reputation-based) arena and small-scale Web frameworks (learn hours, not days or weeks), and speech recognition-based accessibility. However, there is a caveat with your approach and the one taken in Bug 103708. The problem is that it tends to associate a share with a credential. Nevertheless, credentials in Samba are samba-wide, meaning there can only be one login/password combination for all the shares in Samba. So if the user set a specific login for share A and define the password. When later he wants to create a new share (let's call it B), and he wants to access it using the same specific login, there is no need for him to use the same password. If we had the user credentials definition in the GUI that share a folder, we will make the end-user think that a credential is bound to a share, which is not the case in Samba configuration (apart a few exceptions like home directories). Are you referring to the Ubuntu's Samba implementation or Samba in general? I have set up Samba with different credentials for different shares and not just with the home directory. This is why I thought about binding credentials to a share. If you want to have multiple credentials associated with a share, Samba has a way of creating groups. As for associating a set of credentials with a share, I don't think that's bad. We need some mechanism that the user will be driven to to enter credentials for sharing. If we don't do that, people will not set their share username and password. Maybe, the user model would be forcing the user to enter a username and password if there is none and giving them the option to set different usernames and passwords if one exists. The workflow would be something like: Create the first share with Mandatory username password before accepting share definition Create second share optional username password but user is notified of that option and given the ability to set username and password on the share dialog box (don't make me click another button please, my hands hurt) So a more logical place would be a central Samba configuration GUI like the one which can be found in System-Administration-Shared folders. Where you can click to set Samba-wide settings such as the domain/workgroup for the computer, etc. However, in the end-user logic, this is not the expected place, and if we put it here, I'm sure we will find countless forum posts about where to set Samba password. Which is why it belongs on the user form to create a share. It's horrible but one must always accept that the user hate surprises it wants to be led by the nose. To those of us who grew up using command lines, it's anathema. To people like my wife it's comfort. A work-around solution would be to present to a user when he first shares a folder a specific GUI where he can set Samba-wide parameters (such as the domain/workgroup and his credentials). There is however another caveat, which is when there are multiple user at home. If user A install Ubuntu and share folder /tmp. User B, who is using another machine on the network and who knows about the share, wants to access it. User B enters his login name and password and the access is refused. User A would then need to understand that he should create a local user named B and then create the Samba credentials. Unless he is an IT guy, this might not be obvious to him. Exactly. It's even confusing to me at times until I slap my forehead etc. Another idea could be have a simplified sharing mechanism for home users. Where a guest account is activate by default so when a share is opened, people on their network can view them (but not modified them). Then we could imagine that the smbpasswd would be automatically created when a user is created (meaning also in the Ubuntu installation process). If a user set his login credentials, he could then access read/write the shares. There are some caveats to that, mainly for SOHO, Enterprises and enthusiasts where they do not want to have a smb account for each user they are creating. They probably do not want the guest account thing, etc. That also has the serious privacy issues. I have stumbled across peoples machines that are sharing the entire C drive and had access to their e-mail. So, I'm really not comfortable with the guest idea especially if the user gets to set the share directory. Another possibility if you're not comfortable with my idea from above is to create a default username and password when the first account is created so that if they share their own directories, they use their own username and password. I'm not comfortable with that on a couple of levels but I could live with it. A third option is to add to the share dialog box a button labeled share with others. This box would bring up a spreadsheet like
Re: [Bug 103708] Re: When setting up a simple file share you are unable to access the share from a Windows machine, while the samba server has no password set.
*** This bug is a duplicate of bug 24184 *** https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/24184 Huygens wrote: Once you have a draft, you could propose it for review. :-) Perhaps, people could bring ideas too and enhance it. If you look at other specification, some do not even propose software ones, but are just trying to properly define the user need. Those are proposed and then other person can try to create a software specification out of this. So if you feel already just like defining the user needs, that would be great. Perhaps, you could use the forums (http://ubuntuforums.org/) to start a poll/investigation/discussion about what the users want. this is a really idea and I hope we can come up with a small set of options we can present via the forums/mailing list. I am concerned that we'll get too many fanciful/impractical options and not be able to find or get good comments. ---eric -- Speech-recognition in use. It makes mistakes, I correct some. -- When setting up a simple file share you are unable to access the share from a Windows machine, while the samba server has no password set. https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/103708 You received this bug notification because you are a member of Ubuntu Bugs, which is the bug contact for Ubuntu. -- ubuntu-bugs mailing list ubuntu-bugs@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-bugs
[Bug 24184] Re: Samba and system passwords should be synchronized.
in bug 103708 Jonathan Watmough posted a small image showing where one could put a user's button to activate what users are associated with what shares. what Jonathan is concerned with is an important problem, it's just not this problem. I propose adding two more fields to the basic dialog box (see attached) so that one can specify the user and password combination one would use to access that share. if you want multiple users and passwords for a share, one could extend this dialogue to have a tabular box for user name and password type information. I apologize for the crudeness of the image but I have an upper extremity disability plus significant tremors which makes it hard to control mouse etc. and then I further handicapped myself by doing this in Windows paint. ** Attachment added: smbauth.bmp http://librarian.launchpad.net/7748600/smbauth.bmp -- Samba and system passwords should be synchronized. https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/24184 You received this bug notification because you are a member of Ubuntu Bugs, which is a direct subscriber. -- ubuntu-bugs mailing list ubuntu-bugs@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-bugs
[Bug 24184] Re: Samba and system passwords should be synchronized.
I've been thinking about this problem a bit more since I filed the initial bugs and I think password synchronization is only part of the problem. The initial thought was for a naïve user. A naïve user wants to export a share so he/she can use it from another machine. They might even give their password to other people so they can access the share. A more advanced user would want more control over who gets their password and what people can access the share. I believe the advanced user configuration is something that can be implemented relatively easily. It would require modifying the share folder dialog box to have three additional fields. Two of the field would be password and password confirmation and the third would be a list of users permitted. In the future, synchronization could be enabled with the addition of a checkbox indicating the users desire to use their system password. the primary advantage to this potentially simple technique is that it gives the user a hint that something else needs to be done as well as making it possible for them to do it in one place in the GUI. -- Samba and system passwords should be synchronized. https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/24184 You received this bug notification because you are a member of Ubuntu Bugs, which is a direct subscriber. -- ubuntu-bugs mailing list ubuntu-bugs@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-bugs
[Bug 92408] Re: X11 does not support laptop lcd native resolution
id: res: 1400x1050 freq: disptype: lcd/lvds is this what you are looking for? -- X11 does not support laptop lcd native resolution https://launchpad.net/bugs/92408 -- ubuntu-bugs mailing list ubuntu-bugs@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-bugs
[Bug 92408] X11 does not support laptop lcd native resolution
Public bug reported: this has been a long term problem with X11. I think it dates back to 6.06. laptop: compaq presario 1700t lspci reports video as: 01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: ATI Technologies Inc Radeon Mobility M6 LY install sets up video as 1024x768 which works ok but is very fuzzy because of mismatch between native lcd resolution and displayed resolution. to trigger the problem, system-preferences-screen resolution. change resolution to 1400x1040. display changes to higher resolution and has random broken blocks of screen data. I have screen capture if it is any help ProblemType: Bug Architecture: i386 Date: Wed Mar 14 21:33:24 2007 DistroRelease: Ubuntu 7.04 Uname: Linux slappy 2.6.20-10-generic #2 SMP Mon Mar 12 00:02:49 UTC 2007 i686 GNU/Linux ** Affects: Ubuntu Importance: Undecided Status: Unconfirmed -- X11 does not support laptop lcd native resolution https://launchpad.net/bugs/92408 -- ubuntu-bugs mailing list ubuntu-bugs@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-bugs
[Bug 92408] Re: X11 does not support laptop lcd native resolution
** Attachment added: broken screen image http://librarian.launchpad.net/6808281/Screenshot.png -- X11 does not support laptop lcd native resolution https://launchpad.net/bugs/92408 -- ubuntu-bugs mailing list ubuntu-bugs@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-bugs
[Bug 92408] Re: X11 does not support laptop lcd native resolution
** Attachment added: X11 config file http://librarian.launchpad.net/6808303/xorg.conf -- X11 does not support laptop lcd native resolution https://launchpad.net/bugs/92408 -- ubuntu-bugs mailing list ubuntu-bugs@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-bugs
Re: Voice Recognition for Linux
Chris Hayes wrote: Thanks or the feedback Eric. Is it really this hopeless? remember what I said about negative filtering. :-) If I had the time I would finish writing up my bit on the mediator and how it would work. I believe it's eminently practical and even a good idea. given enough hands, it's not that hard to complete relatively soon (i.e. under six months). But well, I don't really have that good hands and code always takes me forever and a day to get done because it wears on my throat. You talked about the Sphinx projects being okay - but not ready for normal users. To what extent are they capable? I'd really love to know if you or anyone else has tried them. I'm sure there are others on the list to have tried and maybe even developed parts of them. I'll let them out themselves. :-) I have looked into them but haven't had the time (and not being a very capable technical user) to get them going, orto get them going nicely. If I knew how well they worked, I'd probably be more inclined to use the time I don't have getting them working. your experience as part of the existence proof that they aren't ready for prime time. The two reasons packages don't get used is that it's incomplete/not ready or it has poor PR. I've been guilty of both of my projects :-) ---eric -- Speech-recognition in use. It makes mistakes, I correct some. -- Ubuntu-accessibility mailing list Ubuntu-accessibility@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-accessibility
Re: Voice Recognition for Linux
as I was constructing my response, and was almost finished when it hit me about what's wrong with the model proposed. it is the equivalent of raw natural text. Full function natural text sucks a little bit. The broken, unable to correct consistently, natural text is horrible and ruins voice models. What you're proposing has even less functionality than a broken natural text. Henrik Nilsen Omma wrote: Eric S. Johansson wrote: this is one half of the solution needed. Not only do you need to propagate text to Linux but you need to provide enough context back to windows so that NaturallySpeaking can select different grammars. It would be nice to also modify the text injected in to Linux because nuanced really screwed the pooch on natural text. My point that this is actually all you need. It has the advantage of being quite simple from a coding point of view: you need the transmitter on the windows system that NS feeds into (a version already exists) and you need a gnome or KDE app on the other end with solid usability and configurability. The latter is something that our open source community is quite good at making and there are good tools like Mono, python, Qt4 that can be used. There is a system that art exists that does exactly what you've opposed. While it was technically successful, it has failed in that nobody but the originator uses it in even he admits this model has some serious shortcomings. The reason I insist on feedback is very simple. A good speech recognition environment lets you lets you correct recognition errors and create application-specific and application neutral commands. One point I've obviously glossed over is training. You'll need to do some training to improve the recognition rate. Under my proposed scheme you would need to do the training natively under windows. I'm quite happy to do that actually. I would rather not worry about training during my daily work with using the system, but would collect the mistakes over a week or so and spend an hour or two doing just training. With the system I'm proposing you could make the Linux client recognise a 'must-train-this-later' command, which would cause it to save the past few lines to a log file. modern systems train incrementally. This improves the user experience because you don't have to put up with continual misrecognition's. Apparently they also train incrementally on what's not corrected which means batch correction is not a good thing. another example is what's happening with me right now. There are a bunch of small words and misrecognized endings that are cropping up with increasing frequency. If nuance hadn't screwed up and left naturaltext in a working state, I would be able to correct them as I dictate into this Thunderbird window. But no, it's so broken I make corrections by hand and as a result, the misrecognition get cast in stone and I need to scrap the user and start over again retraining about every six months. Do not subject users to this kind of frustration and time waste. They will drop the system in a heartbeat if you do. I have no problem leaving the entire user interface for correction etc. in Windows. The only trouble is how do you make it visible if you're running a virtual machine full-screen? Don't run the virtual machine full-screen? this is a difficult task. There is a very nice package called voice coder spearheaded by Alain Desilets up at nrc-it in conjunction with David Fox. Do you have a link to this work? I'd be interested to see. http://voicecode.iit.nrc.ca/VoiceCode/public/ywiki.cgi Something you might also want to see which is a full Select-and-Say interface to Emacs http://emacs-vr-mode.sourceforge.net/ These two things should keep you out of trouble for a while. :-) We don't need any of that. We just accept a text stream from NS, running in pure dictation mode, and create our events based on that. All we are after is the excellent recognition engine. The GUI we leave behind. ... You don't. You set this all up first on the native system along with the initial setup. If you notice that it's not working as it should you open the VMware window or the VNC session where NS is running and make a few adjustments to it directly. the graphical user interface is an integral portion of the dictation process. For example, I pay attention to the little floating box which shows partial recognition states. It gives me an early warning on how I am speaking and the quality of the recognition. It also gives me the ability to terminate a recognition sequence is NaturallySpeaking loses his mind. The little recognition box floats inside the window of the application is active so that if it's not in the window and I'm not getting any text injected, I know it's time to reset/restart NaturallySpeaking. if you look at a system running NaturallySpeaking with the VNC, the dictation box is usually not visible
Re: Voice Recognition for Linux
Henrik Nilsen Omma wrote:
Eric S. Johansson wrote:
In short: Create a copy-left (GPL) tool to transfer text from Naturally
Speaking on Windows to Linux.
this is one half of the solution needed. Not only do you need to
propagate text to Linux but you need to provide enough context back to
windows so that NaturallySpeaking can select different grammars. It
would be nice to also modify the text injected in to Linux because
nuanced really screwed the pooch on natural text.
A few starts have been made on this, but it needs to be organised as a
proper community project and driven forward by several people.
this is a difficult task. There is a very nice package called voice
coder spearheaded by Alain Desilets up at nrc-it in conjunction with
David Fox. They haven't gotten a whole lot of additional contributions.
People with upper extremity disorders tend not to volunteer a whole
lot because quite frankly life is bouncing physical pain against what
needs to be done. It's exhausting.
The user
interface should aim to be better than what the native Windows NS
version has. It should be speech engine and OS agnostic. That way you'll
get people using it to transfer speech between all sorts of different
systems, and it will get more use and development. You should be able to
easily plug in a free engine like Sphinx (so these will be encouraged to
improve) or even Vista's native system, which will be very widespread.
damn, you are the optimist. Yes, user interface does need to be better
but it may not be possible because the recognition engine or systems
around it may not expose the interface is necessary to make it better.
For example, where do you get the information from to give the user
clear feedback that the system is hearing something and it's at the
right level? Also, the whole process of adding or deleting words from
your dictionary, training, or testing your audio input to make sure it
works right? I'm not saying it's impossible. I'm just saying be
prepared to work very very hard. I think we'd be better off finding
some way of overlaying the user interface from NaturallySpeaking on top
of a Linux virtual machine screen. Sucks but you might get done faster
than you are very desirable but overly optimistic wish.
My biggest gripe with NS is the editing interface. The actual
recognition is quite good IMO, but when you do make a mistake it is very
awkward to fix it without using the keyboard. If you give an edit
command and that is not understood correctly either then you get a
meaningless sentence and you are no longer able to easily correct the
one you originally wanted to fix. The end result is that to totally lose
the flow of what you were trying to express.
It's not quite that bad. Select-and-Say when it works is quite useful
for small phrases. What we need to do is propagate the Emacs mark and
point interface into a GUI environment. It's far more effective, at
least when you're noodling about within error-prone navigation process.
In any event, take a look at the voice coder you live for making
corrections. I really like it. It's the best correction interface is
seen so far. David Fox is responsible for that wonderful creation.
I presume the macro functionality in NS is configured so that the
pattern recognition is quite good on the macros you define yourself. So
when you say 'Paste in my address' it generally works. We can (ab)use
this macro facility for our own editing needs. We would define a set of
macros that would be processed by the NS engine and would give us a know
and parseable string.
natpython is the way to go. It lets a user create a sapi4 grammer and
associate a method with the grammar wants it resolves. Or is the term
hits a termial node? Anyway, it works, it's reliable, it's written in
Python and from user level looks to be relatively portable between
recognition requirements.
So saying 'Macro: delete sentence' would actually insert the text
**MACRO-DELETE-SENTENCE** into the text stream. If you were watching the
text on the Windows system the real text would be interspersed with such
commands, but on the Linux system receiving the stream it would just Do
the Right Thing. The big advantage is that it's very configurable this
way so we can make it do what we want.
you mean something like this...
operation = left | right | delete | kill | switch | copy;
datatype = character | word | sentence | paragraph | line | region;
doit exported = operation datatype ;
---
def gotResults_operation(self, words, fullResults):
translationtable={
'leftcharacter': {ctrl+b},
'rightcharacter': {ctrl+f},
'deletecharacter': {Backspace},
'killcharacter': {ctrl+d},
'switchcharacter': {ctrl+t},
'leftword':{esc}b,
'rightword': {esc}f
speech recognition to Linux text injector
http://foss.eepatents.com/WinDictator/wiki/AlphaRelease Ed Suominen created this package which injects text spoken to a Windows speech recognition application and injects it into Linux. He used a modified xnee package to somehow improve the reliability of text injection. I have two queries on this. First, can we use the at-spi instead of a hacked xnee? Second, is there anyone with knowledge of at-spi and working hands would be willing to help with this project? ---eric -- Ubuntu-accessibility mailing list Ubuntu-accessibility@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-accessibility
Re: speech recognition to Linux text injector
Henrik Nilsen Omma wrote: That looks very interesting. I tried to do something similar last year using a VNC connection instead, with mixed results. This looks much more elegant. I'll be very interested to try it. It seems building and installing is a major issue with it at the moment (because everyone has different environments). We should clearly get it packaged for Ubuntu. I don't know anything about Xnee, but I know that Chris wrote some simple C code to inject keystrokes for onBoard, without using Xnee or AT-SPI. http://www.gnu.org/software/xnee/ Xnee is a suite of programs that can record, replay and distribute user actions under the X11 environment. Think of it as a robot that can imitate the job you just did. I agree packaging is a really important step but packaging what is there is not so good. I really think that we should consider eliminating the xnee hack, before distributing. I think simple keystroke injection while a good let's get something working and help some level of disabled user step, it may make it difficult to move to an environment where there is full command and control of gnome. for example, one simple problem is awareness of the currently active window. I use a Python based macro environment for all of my command and control macros. When the grammar recognizes Emacs is active, it turns on the Emacs specific grammars so I can work in Emacs was painfully than I can by hand. Simple keystroke injection makes that difficult. Keystroke injection with active window state feedback makes it less so. Then there is the ever popular select and say feature of NaturallySpeaking. Again with direct injection, not very possible. But with the right at-spi interfaces, we could read the window, find a section to be selected and do whatever magic is necessary. But these things are not happen all at once. I just wanted to highlight a couple of issues that will come in the future. I was hoping to get to try it out today but I'm running out of time. Please keep me up to date on what ever you do. I'm even willing to be a guinea pig. Since I use Linux in a virtual machine, I can create a new test bed as long as I have disk space. My goal is to eventually get to the place where Windows is only a host OS and a speech recognition platform. Linux would run in a virtual machine full-screen and I can get my work done. ---eric -- Ubuntu-accessibility mailing list Ubuntu-accessibility@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-accessibility
