Re: Desktops other than gnome
Hi, Burt, I've never used Knopix. I've used Debian and Ubuntu but both through the Vinux mods. My last attempt to use an unmodified Ubuntu died a-borning. I hear Knopix uses an accessified version of LXDe whom noone seems to know how to duplicate. Now, I've not had the chance to use Unity but, I wonder since it's heading towards the tablet pc market according to what I've read, I wonder, I say, if some of the rather innovative ideas Android and I-Phone have put in place might not be implemented in it. For that matter, I might say the smae of Gnome shell since it, too, is heavily mouse dependent and making it accessible requires quite a bit of work to make keyboard access possible. I-Phone and, to a lesser extent Android, both use gestures to really give someone a feel for the layout of the screen. I don't know why this couldn't be done with a mouse. Configure the mouse so that it only activates if buttons are presed in conjunction with a keyboard press. Control mouse click activates something, regular mouse click reads something in more detail. Window boundaries could be indicated by special sounds like buzzes, tones or beeps. Mouse pointer could be made somewhat less responsive so that it moves 1/3 the amount of pixels it normally would giving you a chance to explore. Widgets and buttons and things could be indicated by special sounds too, tones for available ones and buzzes for grayed out ones. In the tablets or on laptops with gesture pads, Android's brilliant ahaptic feedback feature could be duplicated to give tactile feedback as the user moves his finger around on it. To take a page from I-Phone, 1 finger lets you explore, 3 fingers lets you select. I have no idea how much coding this would take to implement but I don't understand why something like this hasn't been considered or brought up. It's as if thinking on how to make something accessible has stagnated to an extent in non-mobile software. Does anyone have any thoughts on this matter, Alex M On 5/8/11, Burt Henry burt1ib...@gmail.com wrote: I finally got a CD and burned Knopix Adriane 6.44 to it, put that on a usb-key, and did get the main menu to come up in the graphical session. I need to try my old knopix 6.22 disk and see if maybe it will as well since 6.44 had me scared/seems to have a delay built in, i.e. I had to hold alt+f1 down for around a second , maybe more before the menu came up. As Tony said system aps were not accessible, and I had libre office crashes, but I am assuming that's because of stable release Orca..lol... The menu was sparse and I still can't get on-line to install more to see how they perform. Anyone know if there is an accessible way to read sys-tray icons? Knopix showed 2.6.37 for the kernel when I ran uname, nice in theory, but if synaptic and gpartit are not accessible I wonder if there is not more work to do with lode, (that is what Knopix Adrian runs isn't it?) than with Gnome3 and unity. I haven't read much good about the gnome shell though, (and that's not even taking accessibility in to account). I have read at least one blog suggesting that there's enough support to keep some version of gnome 2.x alive for some time to come as Unity is just too mackish, or newbish, or something for the average Linux user. Unity is probably a good deal for first time Linux users, but I still worry that much of its friendlyness will be lost on screen-reader useres. All of this to say that it is not just us blind folk who are feeling a bit like their Linux is up in the air these days. but El 05/08/2011 02:27 PM, Alex Midence escribió: Hi, all, Based on all the trouble that has been going on with gnome and unity and so forth and accessibility, I think that it is a very very good idea for everyone to start exploring other desktops in case one ever goes completely to pot. In recent weeks, I have experimented with Ice WM, Sawfish and Fluxbox. Of them all, Ice WM worked sort of but only as a window manager in Gnome. I never did get Fluxbox to work with Orca and the same goes for Sawfish. Has anyone had any success using any other desktop other than Gnome successfully with Orca? I've heard very promising things about XFCE and LXDE but I'm not sure what I would need to do to try these out since I hear you have to set certain environment variables in some of the files that control them in order for Orca to work. Has anyone done this successfully? I guess, with Ubuntu, there is Xubuntu and Kubuntu. I may be in a position to find out for myself how KDE is coming along but the others are a mystery to me. Thanks. Alex M -- *the above was probably written by- Burt Henry (registered Linux-user 521,886) Contact Info: *email, GTalkAIM- (burt1ib...@gmail.com) *Follow Me on Twitter- @BurtHenry *and I’m on Facebook* -- Ubuntu-accessibility mailing list Ubuntu-accessibility@lists.ubuntu.com
Re: Desktops other than gnome
Hi, Mackenzie, If you plan to include KAccessible in the 11.10 release of Kubuntu, do you think there is a way to create a hotkey that would launch it? For instance, in Vinux, we have either alt-control o or shift control o which runs Orca no matter where you are in Gnome including the gdm login screen. This way, if something ever breaks speech or, hangs it up, you can always restart the screen reader without having to worry about being in the right place to type in its name. I was thinking that such an option would let somebody start hearing their system talk from the very outset. Also, I'm a bit startled by what appears to be a statement that KAccessibility is a screen reader. I thought it was an accessibility api. Does this mean that it is a full-fledged screen reading solution that lets you read the screen in a controled manner like speakup, orca and CO.? I was under the impression that this wasn't the case in KDE which is why no blind people that I know of use it right now. If it reads only a few things, I wonder what would need to be done to it to flesh it out. To have a proper screne reader, you need a few things: 1. Ways to read selective parts of the screen without moving the focus point. This lets you explore without activate anything or losing your place. This is done wither with modifiers that change behavior of movement keys, or in some cases by changing the mode in which the screen reader operates. If you are familiar with Vi, this concept is well known to you in the way Vi lets you have an input and a command mode. The closest and, I'd say most uncanny paralel is in the way windows screen readers treat the browsing of webpages. 2. Granularity of what you are reading and how you move focus around. Read or move forward and backward by window, paragraph, block of code, line, sentence, word, and character and, even use phonetic values for character. Like this: hotel echo lima lima oscar 3. Attribute indicators. Ways to set speech to change voice for things like bold, italic or underline characters or, failing that, words to indicate it. 4. A way to set it so it announces changes in important regions of the screen and ignores others. You may want to know when the webpage you are waiting for has loaded but you don't really care about each and every time the system's clock changes minutes or seconds. You may want a hotkey thaqt lets you access the time though. To make it easier on the poor overwhelmed sap who's got to code all this stuff, you want a nice, complete, configuration dialog so that people can set up their own preferences about this and not put al that burden on developers who may never use a screen reader and can't be expected to guess what you are going to want to know and when. 5. Application awareness. Some applications require different functionality than others and what works amazingly in one may cause inconvenient results in others so, you ned a way for application-specific customizations to be loaded whe that application starts. 6. Widget agnosticism. You need something that lets the user inform the screen reader that a what to do and how to react with a non-standard widget. This is something Orca has thusfar not been able to do but is something those of us with years of using Windows screen readers take for granted. If something isn't quite accessible yet, you at least get some numeric graphics number and some information instead of an inaccessible message and the thing flopping belly up and refusing to give you anything whatsoever. I do believe that if it had this feature, people would've been able to use qt widgets to some extent long ago. The way it is now, you are locked into at-spi and much too much burden is placed on the developers of other software to modify their code to fit the screen reader. In windows, people can and often do render applications which are not released with out-of-the-box accessibility-friendly features into something that works so well, you'd never even suspect it. I've done it myself a time or two. There's more. I feel rather guilty for not coming up with four more things just to round this out to 10 but, I'm sure you get the picture. Bakc to my original question, do you happen to know if KAccessibility actualy offers this sort of thing? If not, do you know or can you point me to docs that would tell me just how much or how little of it can be done with KAccessibility? Best regards, Alex M Date: Sun, 8 May 2011 21:46:25 -0400 From: Mackenzie Morgan maco...@gmail.com To: ubuntu-accessibility@lists.ubuntu.com Subject: Message-ID: BANLkTi=1oarf4ri8ws1akkfmkldnvx3...@mail.gmail.com Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8 On Sun, May 8, 2011 at 3:27 PM, Alex Midence alex.mide...@gmail.com wrote: ?I guess, with Ubuntu, there is Xubuntu and Kubuntu. ?I may be in a position to find out for myself how KDE is coming along but the others are a mystery to me. Kubuntu 11.04 does not include
Re: Desktops other than gnome
On Mon, May 9, 2011 at 9:31 AM, Alex Midence alex.mide...@gmail.com wrote: Hi, Mackenzie, If you plan to include KAccessible in the 11.10 release of Kubuntu, do you think there is a way to create a hotkey that would launch it? For instance, in Vinux, we have either alt-control o or shift control o which runs Orca no matter where you are in Gnome including the gdm login screen. This way, if something ever breaks speech or, hangs it up, you can always restart the screen reader without having to worry about being in the right place to type in its name. Oh, thanks! I'll put that on the list of adjustments to Kubuntu defaults. A default shortcut would be great! The plan so far was to mimic the Ubuntu installer: if the system is installed with the screenreader on, enable it by default. However, I have no idea whether it can run during KDM. I haven't tried it yet. When running on the desktop it has a tray icon (which...well...) and you can choose to make it speak. Having a keyboard shortcut to start it would necessitate that QT_ACCESSIBILTY=1 be set by default on all sessions. I was thinking that such an option would let somebody start hearing their system talk from the very outset. Also, I'm a bit startled by what appears to be a statement that KAccessibility is a screen reader. I thought it was an accessibility api. QAccessible is the API. KAccessible is the screenreader that interacts with QAccessible. Does this mean that it is a full-fledged screen reading solution that lets you read the screen in a controled manner like speakup, orca and CO.? I was under the impression that this wasn't the case in KDE which is why no blind people that I know of use it right now. KAccessible was written in the last year. KDE 4.6 is the first to have it, so Natty is our first release where it could possibly work. If it reads only a few things, I wonder what would need to be done to it to flesh it out. To have a proper screne reader, you need a few things: It can read any Qt or KDE widget that is based on a base-Qt widget. Custom KDE widgets that are from scratch are still in the lurch. This would include the terminal portion of Konsole and also KHTML. Terminals have their own screenreaders though, right? snip list There's more. I feel rather guilty for not coming up with four more things just to round this out to 10 but, I'm sure you get the picture. Bakc to my original question, do you happen to know if KAccessibility actualy offers this sort of thing? If not, do you know or can you point me to docs that would tell me just how much or how little of it can be done with KAccessibility? I've only played with it a little bit, so I'm not really sure about all that. I'd suggest asking on the KDE-Accessibility mailing list. Seb Sauer is the main (only?) developer on KAccessible. -- Mackenzie Morgan -- Ubuntu-accessibility mailing list Ubuntu-accessibility@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-accessibility
