I wish this effort the best of success, but I must say I am stuck between
sceptical and bewildered.
Isn't Dr. T.V. Raman of emacspeak fame on the job with Google accessibility? I
thought he'd been with Google for a good while, but if he's new in the last
year I can still understand that things will take a while. If however he has
not got anything more than lipservice backup from the company...I don't know if
the post from a Google employee talking about the lack of a consistent dev
platform at Google made it on to this list or not, but it certainly showed a
difficult situation.
I guess it comes down to this for me: if Dr. Raman can't line them out on what
is needed as far as accessibility goes then who can,
and has there been a fundamental priority shift that includes accessibility
both now, and as something to be integrated in to long term plans I don't see
much happening.
You are so right that eventual results would make the struggle worth while
however, and I for one am not ready to give up; so, please
at this point I don't know what I can do other than tessst, but test I am and
will be glad to do. Please keep us informed as to any positive developments,
and continue to fill the ears and eyes of your contacts with good ideas.
Maybe I'm too senical, but so far it's like one step forward a year with Google
accessibility and by the time things are right I'd not be surprised to see
something new that makes this all for naut. (two years ago, more or less, the
NVDA screenreader and dev-builds of chromium started working together just
enough to tease us, and chrome and chromium are still not fully accessible with
any screen-reader with out the chromevox extension. Chrome/chromium were at
least semi usable about a year ago any, and I think it was last summer when
chromevox came on-line, (for the OS that starts with a w), and now hopefully
pretty soon Linux users can start using chrome with the extension.
GoogleCL looked promising as well, not the way most pppl will use Google, but
it seems that at least the version available in the Lucid repos stopped working
with some features/commands. I found more recent packages in Maverick and then
Debian repos, but haven't tested this of late.
Calendar is better I guess, but I never cared so much about that myself.
It's that lack of consistency that is so frustrating, and I'm much more willing
to test and experiment than an end user should have to be.
I'll shut up now as this is somewhat pointless to talk about here, but I want
the powers that be at Google to try and look at things from our point of view.
We've been waiting for a long time, and G-docs for instance is a natural for
blind folk, we really do want to be able to use them.
Regards, and maybe next time I write to Google my thoughts will be more
composed from having bent ppl's ears here.
--
B.H.
On Thu, Apr 12, 2012 at 08:46:41PM -0600, Charlie Kravetz wrote:
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I used Gnome Magnification before all the changes started involving
Unity. It has not worked for some time (in years) now. Thus my playing
with DPI to grow the text large enough to see and read it. I have not
played much with Compiz eZoom, myself. I am just getting back into a
position where I will be able to get involved again, and will be
updating documentation for all the Accessibility items in the next
cycle.
In the meantime, I shall continue to attempt to get some information
out for the Google developers, who seem to be lacking in experience as
far as Accessibility goes. Whether or not I am successful will be
determined by how accessible we manage to get google, right?
Experience tells me this is going to be a long battle to fight,
however, the results when we gain are well worth it.
On Thu, 12 Apr 2012 18:14:32 -0700
Robert Cole rkcole72...@gmail.com wrote:
Hello, Charlie.
do you use any screen magnification on your Linux distribution? If in
Ubuntu's Unity you can make use of the Compiz eZoom plugin (which I
would often rely on under Unity), and under GNOME Shell, there is a
great built-in magnifier which can greatly magnify the screen (even more
than the eZoom plugin).
I am planning on writing a blog entry pretty soon on how to get
magnification up and running under both Unity and GNOME Shell.
Unfortuantely, I do not think that a magnifier exists for the GNOME
Fallback Session at this time.
If this could be of help to you please let me know, and I will try to
write back with teh steps to set up zooming keys. Just please let me
know which desktop environment you use. There is also a Zoom feature
under KDE as well which works pretty well.
I hope that I can be of some help to you.
Take care.
On 04/12/2012 10:33 AM, Charlie Kravetz wrote:
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I am a user of Google+. The developers just made recent changes to
