Re: Lubuntu and Accessibility
The problem with running orca on LXDE is that it really only works well in Gnome and so don't know that its a solution. I have tried to run it on xubuntu which uses XCFE which is a GTK+ based desktop and it still didn't work well enough to be functional, ie, it won't read menues. On Tue, 24 May 2011, Luke Yelavich wrote: On Tue, May 24, 2011 at 09:58:58AM EST, Phill Whiteside wrote: From a general chat to our head of development on lubuntu, he is of the opinion that if the code is really (and I mean really) tight, that it would be possible to include within the very tight constraints that we are committed to be able to uphold the inclusion of accessibility and has agreed that we should really strive to attain this. The first thing is making sure LXDE is actually accessible, i.e make sure it has keyboard shortcuts, and supports the launching of the accessibility framework at startup etc. As to using the LXDE GUI with Orca etc, I think the biggest problem here is the use of python. The components of the stack written in c should be performant enough to work, and if they're not, then I am sure upstream would be willing to help try and optimize them a little more, but Orca being python is unfortunately a rather big blocker for this environment. I remember running Orca on a dual Celeron 466 a few years back in GNOME, and it was rather laggy in performance, I.e a quarter to half a second would go by before I got speech feedback from my action. So while I think the goals of getting Lubuntu more accessible are noble, I am not sure it will be possible for it to be doable with acceptable accessibility performance for users. I am not saying don't try, but unless Orca or another screen reader was developed in c, then using orca on LXDE is likely to be somewhat painful. Luke -- Ubuntu-accessibility mailing list Ubuntu-accessibility@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-accessibility -- Ubuntu-accessibility mailing list Ubuntu-accessibility@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-accessibility
Unity with Orca-- it's almost fully accessible!
Hi, all! I decided to change the desktop, on this trusty netbook, to Unity from Classic Gnome, having remembered decent accessibility when I played with it at a Ubuntu Beta Bug Jam at a Canonical office. In my previous message, you'll recall, I mentioned trouble accessing the indicator applet, where one chooses network connection, checks battery, restarts, etc. I'm happy to report that these menus are easy to find and read when using Unity. I like how they are attached to the menu strip for the focused application. Using that filter string to get quickly to a subset of the items found in Preferences, is very nice, too, so long as one knows what she/he is looking for. For instance, I typed login screen into the filter, and found myself right on the unlock button. The shortcuts, 'super+0' through 'super+9' are very quick and convenient; What a great idea! Now, here are the things that still need some work, perhaps the team is already aware of these? Context menus for launcher buttons do not speak. The speaking of Unity menu names, as one scrubs with left or right arrow is inconsistent. All Unity menu items (wifi options, volume/mute, etc, are spoken as checkbox unchecked; I happen to know what is a checkbox, and what is not, but, this should be fixed. The new-style places options do not speak. Partial results in the 'run' dialogue do not speak. Finally, when switching applications with 'alt+tab or 'alt+shift+tab' keys, Orca will not speak while the modifier key(s) held down. When keys released, Orca, first, speaks the name of the application that had focus, then the name of the newly-focused application. This requires that user memorize the order of applications in the stack, an unnecessary distraction. I hope the above will help Ubuntu's design, development, and QA efforts. Please advise on whether or how I can expand on any of these. Thanks for listening, Dave Hunt (I'm totally blind, BTW) -- Ubuntu-accessibility mailing list Ubuntu-accessibility@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-accessibility
How to customize Launcher Toolbar using Orca?
Hi, I'm looking for an accessible way to remove items from my launcher toolbar, and keep others. Since the per-item context menus are not spoken, how can I do this? Thanks, Dave -- Ubuntu-accessibility mailing list Ubuntu-accessibility@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-accessibility
Re: Unity with Orca-- it's almost fully accessible!
On Tue, 24 May 2011 12:34:49 -0400 Dave Hunt ka1...@gmail.com wrote: Hi, all! I decided to change the desktop, on this trusty netbook, to Unity from Classic Gnome, having remembered decent accessibility when I played with it at a Ubuntu Beta Bug Jam at a Canonical office. In my previous message, you'll recall, I mentioned trouble accessing the indicator applet, where one chooses network connection, checks battery, restarts, etc. I'm happy to report that these menus are easy to find and read when using Unity. I like how they are attached to the menu strip for the focused application. Using that filter string to get quickly to a subset of the items found in Preferences, is very nice, too, so long as one knows what she/he is looking for. For instance, I typed login screen into the filter, and found myself right on the unlock button. The shortcuts, 'super+0' through 'super+9' are very quick and convenient; What a great idea! Now, here are the things that still need some work, perhaps the team is already aware of these? Context menus for launcher buttons do not speak. The speaking of Unity menu names, as one scrubs with left or right arrow is inconsistent. All Unity menu items (wifi options, volume/mute, etc, are spoken as checkbox unchecked; I happen to know what is a checkbox, and what is not, but, this should be fixed. The new-style places options do not speak. Partial results in the 'run' dialogue do not speak. Finally, when switching applications with 'alt+tab or 'alt+shift+tab' keys, Orca will not speak while the modifier key(s) held down. When keys released, Orca, first, speaks the name of the application that had focus, then the name of the newly-focused application. This requires that user memorize the order of applications in the stack, an unnecessary distraction. I hope the above will help Ubuntu's design, development, and QA efforts. Please advise on whether or how I can expand on any of these. Thanks for listening, Dave Hunt (I'm totally blind, BTW) Thank you for the update. We are hoping to address many of these issues in Oneiric. We did run out of time trying to resolve many of these in Natty, but will be working them as soon as possible in Oneiric. Please do continue these tests, as they keep us informed of the progress being made. They also help us ensure we are not missing these things, because we don't always remember everything. -- Charlie Kravetz Linux Registered User Number 425914 [http://counter.li.org/] Never let anyone steal your DREAM. [http://keepingdreams.com] -- Ubuntu-accessibility mailing list Ubuntu-accessibility@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-accessibility
Re: How to customize Launcher Toolbar using Orca?
On 05/24/2011 07:21 PM, Dave Hunt wrote: Hi, I'm looking for an accessible way to remove items from my launcher toolbar, and keep others. Since the per-item context menus are not spoken, how can I do this? The lack of accessibility support of those per-item context item is already listed as a bug: https://bugs.launchpad.net/unity/+bug/740698 AFAIK, there is no way to do that without those menus. The best option here would be solve that bug. As Charlie Kravetz mentioned on a different mail, we hope to solve this issues on the next ubuntu release. Stay tunned. BR -- API -- Ubuntu-accessibility mailing list Ubuntu-accessibility@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-accessibility
Fwd: Lubuntu and Accessibility
-- Forwarded message -- From: Rob Whyte fu...@thefudge.net Date: Tue, May 24, 2011 at 8:24 AM Subject: Re: Lubuntu and Accessibility To: Phill Whiteside phi...@ubuntu.com Hi guys, in my own efforts to get orca better with LXDE I conversed with Klaus Knopper the author of Knoppix. I have put his notes below.. I also tried with nto much success to try and figure out why orca did not work with thunar though it claims to have great gtk support. Please find notes below and hope it is helpful. export SAL_USE_VCLPLUGIN=gtk GTK_MODULES=gail:atk-bridge before starting a GTK program makes it aware of orca as screenreader. You need to start orca as well, of course. The panel containing the menu (lxpanel in our case) will send the highlighted menu item to orca automatically if the two variables mentioned before are set before starting lxpanel. The tricky part is to pop up the menu without the mouse. Unfortunately, lxpanel does not have a hotkey for this on its own, but the command lxpanelctl menu will notify lxpanel to show the menu. Now you add this command to the window managers hotkey list (which is different in compiz-fusion and metacity), and you are there. Once the hotkey (Alt-F1 in Knoppix) is pressed, lxpanelctl menu will be called, and the menu pops up. I did not find a way yet to browse through the dock icons in lxpanel, though it must be possible somehow, since using the mouse will focus the icons and lets orca speak them. Maybe, just the internal link between icons and a hotkey for selecting them is missing. pcmanfm works quite well with orca, though the desktop background version of it is not very talkative. If you start the windowed version of pcmanfm, you can switch between canvases with eithger TAB or the cursor keys (sometimes it's not very intuitive to understand which one to use). It should be possible, yet I'm unsure how to make the desktop manager part of pcmanfm put the focus on the first icon on the desktop. Once one item has the focus, you can browse through the desktop icons with the cursor keys. surely pcmanfm could need some accessibility enhancements concerning hotkeys and their documentation. in regards to accessing the panel, The only way I found so far is the lxpanelctl command which is to be called by the window manager. Alt-F1 pops up the menu in Knoppix. The hotkey modifications for compiz-fusion and metacity concerning the lxpanel menu is present in /etc/X11/Xsession.d/45knoppix. Here is an excerpt: -- case $STARTUP in *lxde|lx*) # Need to change Alt_F1 and Alt_F2 hotkeys in order to make LXDE menu accessible sed -i -e 's/as_main_menu_key *=.*$/as_main_menu_key = Disabled/g' \ -e 's/as_run_command0_key *=.*$/as_run_command0_key = AltF1/g' \ -e 's/as_command0 *=.*$/as_command0 = lxpanelctl menu/g' \ $HOME/.config/compiz/compizconfig/Default.ini 2/dev/null gconftool --type string \ --set /apps/metacity/global_keybindings/panel_main_menu disabled \ --set /apps/metacity/global_keybindings/panel_run_dialog disabled \ --set /apps/metacity/global_keybindings/run_command_1 'AltF1' \ --set /apps/metacity/global_keybindings/run_command_2 'AltF2' \ --set /apps/metacity/keybinding_commands/command_1 'lxpanelctl menu' \ --set /apps/metacity/keybinding_commands/command_2 'lxpanelctl run' ;; *) # Change Alt-F1 back when not running lxde sed -i -e 's/as_main_menu_key *=.*$/as_main_menu_key = AltF1/g' \ $HOME/.config/compiz/compizconfig/Default.ini 2/dev/null gconftool --type string \ --set /apps/metacity/global_keybindings/panel_main_menu 'AltF1' \ --set /apps/metacity/global_keybindings/panel_run_dialog 'AltF2' ;; esac -- Of course this can also be set manually in gconf-editor (metacity/gnome) or ccsm (compiz-fusion). Klaus Knopper On 23/05/11 19:58, Phill Whiteside wrote: Hiyas, much has happened recently, including lubuntu getting clearance for full adoption at 11.10 by Canonical. Whilst I have quietly pushed accessibility (well, maybe not so quietly) as a part of lubuntu, we now need a bit of help off this team. Our specification of the minimal hardware it will run on cannot be broken, nor can our commitment to pre i686 processors. https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Lubuntu From a general chat to our head of development on lubuntu, he is of the opinion that if the code is really (and I mean really) tight, that it would be possible to include within the very tight constraints that we are committed to be able to uphold the inclusion of accessibility and has agreed that we should really strive to attain this. We are short of devs who can dedicate resources to this task, so I ask that any of you who can assist do so. I'd really like to see lubuntu 11.10 come out with as much accessibility as is possible on A Pentium II or Celeron system with 128 MiB of RAM is probably a bottom-line configuration that may yield slow yet
Feedback about Ubuntu requested
When your interaction with other Ubuntu users is entirely made up of developers talking about bugs they need to fix and users seeking support (IRC, forums, bug reports), your perspective changes. It's hard to get a good idea of the big picture. What portion of users are hitting problems in what areas? How do users who've reported bugs feel about the experience? How are the local community teams doing? How's accessibility? That kind of stuff is hard to wrap your head around without metrics. To that end, a bunch of members of the Ubuntu community have worked together to create a survey (that I really hope works nicely with screenreaders) that'll help those of us working on various parts of Ubuntu understand where we need to improve and how we can do better. If you have an opinion on Ubuntu, please take 5 minutes to fill out the following Ubuntu User-Experience survey: http://is.gd/vnPvog Thank you! -- Mackenzie Morgan -- Ubuntu-accessibility mailing list Ubuntu-accessibility@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-accessibility
Re: [Lubuntu-desktop] Fwd: Lubuntu and Accessibility
For the panel, Brian Cameron has a good idea. He suggested that we can use a different UI for orca. That means, replacing all buttons in the bar with standard GtkButton widget rather than some hand-made ones. This looks ugly, but will have much better usability. If accessibility mode is on, we use standard GtkButton with text label rather than current ones with images on them. On Wed, May 25, 2011 at 6:58 AM, Phill Whiteside phi...@ubuntu.com wrote: -- Forwarded message -- From: Rob Whyte fu...@thefudge.net Date: Tue, May 24, 2011 at 8:24 AM Subject: Re: Lubuntu and Accessibility To: Phill Whiteside phi...@ubuntu.com Hi guys, in my own efforts to get orca better with LXDE I conversed with Klaus Knopper the author of Knoppix. I have put his notes below.. I also tried with nto much success to try and figure out why orca did not work with thunar though it claims to have great gtk support. Please find notes below and hope it is helpful. export SAL_USE_VCLPLUGIN=gtk GTK_MODULES=gail:atk-bridge before starting a GTK program makes it aware of orca as screenreader. You need to start orca as well, of course. The panel containing the menu (lxpanel in our case) will send the highlighted menu item to orca automatically if the two variables mentioned before are set before starting lxpanel. The tricky part is to pop up the menu without the mouse. Unfortunately, lxpanel does not have a hotkey for this on its own, but the command lxpanelctl menu will notify lxpanel to show the menu. Now you add this command to the window managers hotkey list (which is different in compiz-fusion and metacity), and you are there. Once the hotkey (Alt-F1 in Knoppix) is pressed, lxpanelctl menu will be called, and the menu pops up. I did not find a way yet to browse through the dock icons in lxpanel, though it must be possible somehow, since using the mouse will focus the icons and lets orca speak them. Maybe, just the internal link between icons and a hotkey for selecting them is missing. pcmanfm works quite well with orca, though the desktop background version of it is not very talkative. If you start the windowed version of pcmanfm, you can switch between canvases with eithger TAB or the cursor keys (sometimes it's not very intuitive to understand which one to use). It should be possible, yet I'm unsure how to make the desktop manager part of pcmanfm put the focus on the first icon on the desktop. Once one item has the focus, you can browse through the desktop icons with the cursor keys. surely pcmanfm could need some accessibility enhancements concerning hotkeys and their documentation. in regards to accessing the panel, The only way I found so far is the lxpanelctl command which is to be called by the window manager. Alt-F1 pops up the menu in Knoppix. The hotkey modifications for compiz-fusion and metacity concerning the lxpanel menu is present in /etc/X11/Xsession.d/45knoppix. Here is an excerpt: -- case $STARTUP in *lxde|lx*) # Need to change Alt_F1 and Alt_F2 hotkeys in order to make LXDE menu accessible sed -i -e 's/as_main_menu_key *=.*$/as_main_menu_key = Disabled/g' \ -e 's/as_run_command0_key *=.*$/as_run_command0_key = AltF1/g' \ -e 's/as_command0 *=.*$/as_command0 = lxpanelctl menu/g' \ $HOME/.config/compiz/compizconfig/Default.ini 2/dev/null gconftool --type string \ --set /apps/metacity/global_keybindings/panel_main_menu disabled \ --set /apps/metacity/global_keybindings/panel_run_dialog disabled \ --set /apps/metacity/global_keybindings/run_command_1 'AltF1' \ --set /apps/metacity/global_keybindings/run_command_2 'AltF2' \ --set /apps/metacity/keybinding_commands/command_1 'lxpanelctl menu' \ --set /apps/metacity/keybinding_commands/command_2 'lxpanelctl run' ;; *) # Change Alt-F1 back when not running lxde sed -i -e 's/as_main_menu_key *=.*$/as_main_menu_key = AltF1/g' \ $HOME/.config/compiz/compizconfig/Default.ini 2/dev/null gconftool --type string \ --set /apps/metacity/global_keybindings/panel_main_menu 'AltF1' \ --set /apps/metacity/global_keybindings/panel_run_dialog 'AltF2' ;; esac -- Of course this can also be set manually in gconf-editor (metacity/gnome) or ccsm (compiz-fusion). Klaus Knopper On 23/05/11 19:58, Phill Whiteside wrote: Hiyas, much has happened recently, including lubuntu getting clearance for full adoption at 11.10 by Canonical. Whilst I have quietly pushed accessibility (well, maybe not so quietly) as a part of lubuntu, we now need a bit of help off this team. Our specification of the minimal hardware it will run on cannot be broken, nor can our commitment to pre i686 processors. https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Lubuntu From a general chat to our head of development on lubuntu, he is of the opinion that if the code is really (and I mean really)
Re: [Lubuntu-desktop] Fwd: Lubuntu and Accessibility
Hi I like that approach, Plus as I'm totally blind, I don't care about the graphics and that's just resources being used for no reason for some buttons. Alex On 5/24/11, PCMan pcman...@gmail.com wrote: For the panel, Brian Cameron has a good idea. He suggested that we can use a different UI for orca. That means, replacing all buttons in the bar with standard GtkButton widget rather than some hand-made ones. This looks ugly, but will have much better usability. If accessibility mode is on, we use standard GtkButton with text label rather than current ones with images on them. On Wed, May 25, 2011 at 6:58 AM, Phill Whiteside phi...@ubuntu.com wrote: -- Forwarded message -- From: Rob Whyte fu...@thefudge.net Date: Tue, May 24, 2011 at 8:24 AM Subject: Re: Lubuntu and Accessibility To: Phill Whiteside phi...@ubuntu.com Hi guys, in my own efforts to get orca better with LXDE I conversed with Klaus Knopper the author of Knoppix. I have put his notes below.. I also tried with nto much success to try and figure out why orca did not work with thunar though it claims to have great gtk support. Please find notes below and hope it is helpful. export SAL_USE_VCLPLUGIN=gtk GTK_MODULES=gail:atk-bridge before starting a GTK program makes it aware of orca as screenreader. You need to start orca as well, of course. The panel containing the menu (lxpanel in our case) will send the highlighted menu item to orca automatically if the two variables mentioned before are set before starting lxpanel. The tricky part is to pop up the menu without the mouse. Unfortunately, lxpanel does not have a hotkey for this on its own, but the command lxpanelctl menu will notify lxpanel to show the menu. Now you add this command to the window managers hotkey list (which is different in compiz-fusion and metacity), and you are there. Once the hotkey (Alt-F1 in Knoppix) is pressed, lxpanelctl menu will be called, and the menu pops up. I did not find a way yet to browse through the dock icons in lxpanel, though it must be possible somehow, since using the mouse will focus the icons and lets orca speak them. Maybe, just the internal link between icons and a hotkey for selecting them is missing. pcmanfm works quite well with orca, though the desktop background version of it is not very talkative. If you start the windowed version of pcmanfm, you can switch between canvases with eithger TAB or the cursor keys (sometimes it's not very intuitive to understand which one to use). It should be possible, yet I'm unsure how to make the desktop manager part of pcmanfm put the focus on the first icon on the desktop. Once one item has the focus, you can browse through the desktop icons with the cursor keys. surely pcmanfm could need some accessibility enhancements concerning hotkeys and their documentation. in regards to accessing the panel, The only way I found so far is the lxpanelctl command which is to be called by the window manager. Alt-F1 pops up the menu in Knoppix. The hotkey modifications for compiz-fusion and metacity concerning the lxpanel menu is present in /etc/X11/Xsession.d/45knoppix. Here is an excerpt: -- case $STARTUP in *lxde|lx*) # Need to change Alt_F1 and Alt_F2 hotkeys in order to make LXDE menu accessible sed -i -e 's/as_main_menu_key *=.*$/as_main_menu_key = Disabled/g' \ -e 's/as_run_command0_key *=.*$/as_run_command0_key = AltF1/g' \ -e 's/as_command0 *=.*$/as_command0 = lxpanelctl menu/g' \ $HOME/.config/compiz/compizconfig/Default.ini 2/dev/null gconftool --type string \ --set /apps/metacity/global_keybindings/panel_main_menu disabled \ --set /apps/metacity/global_keybindings/panel_run_dialog disabled \ --set /apps/metacity/global_keybindings/run_command_1 'AltF1' \ --set /apps/metacity/global_keybindings/run_command_2 'AltF2' \ --set /apps/metacity/keybinding_commands/command_1 'lxpanelctl menu' \ --set /apps/metacity/keybinding_commands/command_2 'lxpanelctl run' ;; *) # Change Alt-F1 back when not running lxde sed -i -e 's/as_main_menu_key *=.*$/as_main_menu_key = AltF1/g' \ $HOME/.config/compiz/compizconfig/Default.ini 2/dev/null gconftool --type string \ --set /apps/metacity/global_keybindings/panel_main_menu 'AltF1' \ --set /apps/metacity/global_keybindings/panel_run_dialog 'AltF2' ;; esac -- Of course this can also be set manually in gconf-editor (metacity/gnome) or ccsm (compiz-fusion). Klaus Knopper On 23/05/11 19:58, Phill Whiteside wrote: Hiyas, much has happened recently, including lubuntu getting clearance for full adoption at 11.10 by Canonical. Whilst I have quietly pushed accessibility (well, maybe not so quietly) as a part of lubuntu, we now need a bit of help off this team. Our specification of the minimal hardware it will run on cannot be
Re: [Lubuntu-desktop] Fwd: Lubuntu and Accessibility
On Wed, May 25, 2011 at 11:44:10AM EST, PCMan wrote: For the panel, Brian Cameron has a good idea. He suggested that we can use a different UI for orca. That means, replacing all buttons in the bar with standard GtkButton widget rather than some hand-made ones. This looks ugly, but will have much better usability. If accessibility mode is on, we use standard GtkButton with text label rather than current ones with images on them. An alternative is to make the existing buttons accessible, by adding calls to atk to properly identify and label the buttons. This reduces the amount of divergence and makes it easier for you to maintain, as you don't have to maintain a set of buttons using 2 different ways of rendering etc. Luke -- Ubuntu-accessibility mailing list Ubuntu-accessibility@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-accessibility
