Re: Accessibility suggestion and Bug
On Sat, 21 Jan 2012, Petra Ritter wrote: Hallo, I managed it to change the Mouse cursor in Coror and Size. [solution elided for brevity] This works fine for me exept in the Desktop itself it doesn't work at all. At the desktop the Mouse Cursor has no canged. Does the Xcursor and mask file I sent go any way towards helping, as that only works on the desktop in X? They go in your home directory. [...] Best regards Petra Ritter Hugh -- Ubuntu-accessibility mailing list Ubuntu-accessibility@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-accessibility
Re: How to Change Mouse Cursor Theme on Ubuntu 11.10 Oneiric Ocelot
On Wed, 18 Jan 2012, Petra Ritter wrote:
Hi,
Is this the only Way to change the Mouse-Corsor in color and size?
http://www.ubuntubuzz.com/2011/12/how-to-change-mouse-cursor-theme-on.html
I need a black and a bigger Mouse cursor, to be able to see it.
I don't need the hight color thema I just nedd a black and big Mouse Cursor.
Thanks for the help
Best regards
Petra Ritter
I've not had chance to do much on Ubuntu, but have found the big X
cursor I used on the Suns here. The cursor and the mask file
are attached. I think I started out from this:
http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/X-Big-Cursor.html
although the link to the copy I was pointing at is now broken.
I created a big cursor with the X bitmap editor and used that, but
my problem was that it only worked on the root (background) window,
and when I went into applications they used their own cursors, which
were small. I used xeyes some of the time to find the cursor, but
this was suboptimal. I never really did find a good answer to
this one. The magnifier helped a bit.
Hopefully that Howto, although old (1997), will be a stopgap until
you get a more useful answer from someone else.
Hugh#define _width 64
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Re: Persona writing sprint this weekend 12th and 13th November
Thank you (all) for the work on this. I've not been very active at all on this, but would like to contribute. I've forgotten what I need to do to get (re-)started on the Pad system. It might be useful to have a link or two about that. Will there be more than one VI persona? Our needs are different, and conflict! There have been times when I've needed lots of light, and times when I have been photophobic, just as an example. :-) RP is an interesting choice because it does occur with deafness in Usher Syndrome. I have things I'd like to see mentioned, but I don't want to write them up if they would misrepresent the needs of someone with RP. For example: NS-WYSIWYG - Non-Strict WYSIWYG -- We Know the paper will be white but the screen white is *not* WYSIWYG because paper does not glow, reading a printed page is not like staring into a light bulb: allow me to reverse the colours or choose something else. I never did convince Star Office devs of this. A Magnifier that works by warping the screen, so none of it is hidden. The non-magnified parts are compressed, so you can still see where you are relatively. Maybe the GPU and display drivers could be made to do this? And I'd like to be able to change the mouse to screen sized crosshairs like on the old Tektronix terminals, so you cannot lose the pointer. That's all I can think of at the moment. Well, that's 3 impossible things before US breakfast time. Hugh On Wed, 9 Nov 2011, Alan Bell wrote: Hi all, one of the actions from UDS was to crack on and get more of the persona documents out, these help us to communicate the need for accessibility considerations to be included in the design process. We have already published Faisal (fine motor control, pain and color blindness) http://ubuntuaccessibility.wordpress.com/2011/01/27/meet-faisal/ and Daniela (fully blind) http://ubuntuaccessibility.wordpress.com/2011/04/06/meet-daniela/ and we have outline plans for Simon (partially sighted), John (deaf) and Henrietta (cognitive and memory issues) I would like to propose we work together on the remaining personas we want to cover, starting with Simon as the next one to publish. Simon is visually impaired, but not completely blind, so will use a large monitor with screen magnifiers and high contrast settings rather than full time screen reader use. His vision might be getting worse over time, so he might be learning to use Orca, and might like some more audio cues from the desktop. We are using the following page to collaboratively draft the text http://pad.ubuntu-uk.org/simon and will be chatting in the #ubuntu-accessibility IRC channel. The personas are written to a rough framework of topics which match the personas used internally at Canonical by the design team, so we want to fit in with that, but present some more interesting design challenges. It would be great to get as many people involved as possible in the drafting and editing process, particularly those with knowledge of visual impairments. The personas should be accurate and informative, and at least as important, they should be interesting and nice people. I am not setting any particular time for working on this, but I imagine there will be people online and active throughout the day for Europe and USA Alan. -- The Open Learning Centre is rebranding, find out about our new name and look at http://libertus.co.uk -- 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
Re: Persona writing sprint this weekend 12th and 13th November
On Thu, 10 Nov 2011, Alan Bell wrote: On 10/11/11 11:04, Hugh Sasse wrote: [...] I've forgotten what I need to do to get (re-)started on the Pad system. It might be useful to have a link or two about that. basically go to the pad page in a graphical browser and start typing anywhere you want. OK, added a couple of things. I don't have a CCTV magnifier at home, and I don't use a web cam, so maybe someone can add something about: Can present day CCTVs input to computers pretty much as standard? Can you use Web cams (maybe with photography macro adaptors) as CCTV magnifiers? With Image Magick, etc that might be a good use case for Simon. Will there be more than one VI persona? Our needs are different, and conflict! There have been times when I've needed lots of light, and times when I have been photophobic, just as an example. :-) in the plan we are separating blind from VI, but I am hoping we can get all the VI needs boiled down into one persona (given we already have Faisal who is colourblind). RP http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retinitis_pigmentosa is a good choice as it is progressive, which means we can get various levels of VI in the one persona. We could do loads of persona documents and cover *everything* but I think it is a better choice to cover the needs of the Ubuntu target audience in a minimal set that the non-a11y specialist contributers to Ubuntu can understand. So the personas should represent all the Ubuntu users, but the target audience of our persona project is all developers and contributors, not just those working on stuff like zoom and screen readers. OK, so it's a good enough model of visual impairment, until we need something better. That's a sensible engineering decision. I was concerned that the experience of RP will be quite different from Macula Degeneration etc. RP is an interesting choice because it does occur with deafness in Usher Syndrome. I would like to raise the flag for a deafblind persona, though. In the UK, for example, there are about 24,000 deafblind people, but they so often seem to be batted like tennis balls between the organizations of/for [dD]eaf people and those of/for blind people, but the solutions offered usually rely on having the other sense intact. There are widely varying stats for the USA http://www.aadb.org/FAQ/faq_DeafBlindness.html#count Thank you, Hugh -- Ubuntu-accessibility mailing list Ubuntu-accessibility@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-accessibility
Re: Persona writing sprint this weekend 12th and 13th November
On Thu, 10 Nov 2011, Alan Bell wrote: On 10/11/11 15:11, Hugh Sasse wrote: OK, added a couple of things. I don't have a CCTV magnifier at home, and I don't use a web cam, so maybe someone can add something about: Can present day CCTVs input to computers pretty much as standard? Can you use Web cams (maybe with photography macro adaptors) as CCTV magnifiers? With Image Magick, etc that might be a good use case for Simon. what is the CCTV for? Is this a security camera of some kind? :-) No, it's for magnification. First non-advertising one I found on the web was this: http://www.afb.org/Section.asp?SectionID=4TopicID=31DocumentID=221 They'll magnify, change the colours, increase the contrast, and some even do more processing on what is placed on the tray underneath the TV/camera unit. People use them for close work, reading, etc. A good description is from Abilitynet. http://abilitynet.wetpaint.com/page/CCTV+and+Video+Magnifiers (Not sure about the wetpaint in the domain name. http://www.abilitynet.org.uk/edu_sensoryhardware#cctv might be better for that reason. ) Personally I find hand magnifiers easier, but they are less of interest for this topic. OK, so it's a good enough model of visual impairment, until we need something better. That's a sensible engineering decision. I was concerned that the experience of RP will be quite different from Macula Degeneration etc. it probably would be, but I am guessing the options we can provide on the computer for assistance are pretty much the same, magnification, speech or audio cues and tweaks to colours and contrasts. OK. I would like to raise the flag for a deafblind persona, though. In the UK, for example, there are about 24,000 deafblind people, but they so often seem to be batted like tennis balls between the organizations of/for [dD]eaf people and those of/for blind people, but the solutions offered usually rely on having the other sense intact. There are widely varying stats for the USA http://www.aadb.org/FAQ/faq_DeafBlindness.html#count Thank you, Hugh totally agree, but I am not sure what we can do from an Ubuntu desktop perspective, to use a computer a deafblind person will require a braille output device (which is supported, but I don't have the hardware or skill to use it). In theory it would be the same as the blindness profile, but using braille rather than speech dispatcher. It would be massively hard to use the desktop that way, but probably not technically impossible. I am not sure there is much we can do to optimise the desktop for that persona which would be in any way different to the blindness profile. I'm not in regular contact with deafblind people these days, but when I was I was left with the impression that braille use is greater among deafblind people as a proportion than it is among blind people. But there are other modes of communication which are more unusual, and I don't know how difficult they are to cater for, or how common they are now. As two examples: Circa 1980 there was a deafblind radio amateur who successfully used morse code by touch. Circa 2002 there was a project called Dexter which was a robotic hand producing the US one handed Deaf fingerspelling alphabet to be read by touch. Maybe that was driven by RS232, I can't remember now. So some of the needs will be distinct from those of blind people and deaf people. It might be worth asking AADB if they'd like any input. I think they are probably the biggest deafblind organisation in the world, or at least the anglophone world. At a wild guess, anyway. It might generate some interesting ideas, anyway. Hugh -- Ubuntu-accessibility mailing list Ubuntu-accessibility@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-accessibility
Re: Build a speech generating device
On Sat, 30 Jul 2011, Frederik Elwert wrote: there are only few speech generating devices (SGDs) available on the market, and those are as limited as they are expensive, I plan to build a custom SGD using a tablet computer as a basis and applying available I don't know about the hardware. I knew people who used Texas Instruments chips, but I don't expect they'd include all the German phonemes. The primary components I identified to be necessary are * a virtual keyboard with word prediction OK, the only one I know of is Dasher, which you have found. The inference group have a thing called Tapir, which is designed for on screen text entry like texting. I don't think it will do all the symbols on the keyboard, but it is at http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/tapir/ It didn't seem to be a quick way of getting text in, but for people with low mobility it may have some use. In the book Beautiful Code [Andy Oram, Greg Wison, O'Reilly, 2007, ISBN:9780596510046] Chapter 30 When a button is all that connects you to the world discusses the software used by Professor Hawking. It claims the download is at http://holisticit.com/eLocutor/elocutorv3.htm although I can find nothing useful there. The search engines take me to http://hawking.sourceforge.net/ and it appears that the download is available as an executable or a Zip file, so I suspect it is Windows only. For prediction there is also Presage http://presage.sourceforge.net/ which is really a library, so could be attached to something else. It does have some wxPython demos, which I can't get working [on Cygwin], though your experience on Linux could well be better. Way back, there used to be a program called reactivekbd, which was a predictive text entry system that could be used from the shell. It seems to be here: http://ftp.sunet.se/pub/usenet/ftp.uu.net/comp.sources.unix/volume20/reactivekbd/ I had that working under Sunos 4.mumble, but have not retried recently. The dasher project does have the Tcl/Tk dasher which may still be useful if you can't get the rest to build and work, but that ought to reasonably easy to connect to the HTTP interface of OpenMary. * pre-defined text snippets * a speech synthesizer backend (for German language output) I think espeak supports German, but I'm not in a position to comment on the quality. http://espeak.sourceforge.net/ * a frontend to the speech synthesizer Both OpenMary and Espeak have front ends you can type into. The OpenMary example client is in Java, and there is a Ruby one and a Python one in the repository now. They will need more work for non-Windows: lots of choices for sound on Linux. For the speech synthesizer, I currently plan to use OpenMary[1], since its output quality is significantly better than espeak?s, even with mbrola voices. I think they are dropping mbrola voices because they need a non-java backend for it, and they mostly have prosody working now. See Msg Id: 4da410ad.8040...@dfki.de posted to Mary-users on 12 APR 2011. For the speech synthesizer frontend, I plan to either adapt gespeaker, I don't know about gespeaker, so I searched, and found this: http://alternativeto.net/software/gespeaker/ thereby finding Kmouth http://www.schmi-dt.de/kmouth/index.en.html which claims to have word completion and a phrase book, as well as history. [The rest trimmed] Hope some of that helps, Hugh -- Ubuntu-accessibility mailing list Ubuntu-accessibility@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-accessibility
Re: Build a speech generating device
On Sat, 30 Jul 2011, Hugh Sasse wrote: In the book Beautiful Code [Andy Oram, Greg Wison, O'Reilly, 2007, s/Wison/Wilson/ ISBN:9780596510046] Chapter 30 When a button is all that connects Hugh -- Ubuntu-accessibility mailing list Ubuntu-accessibility@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-accessibility
Re: Tactile View
Until someone else gives a better answer: This seems to rely on output to braille embossers, or output to capsule paper. (Capsule paper has bubbles in it that expand when heated, so you print in black on it, the black bits absorb the heat, and get raised.) Thus any drawing program could probably use capsule paper, but Braille is another matter. You may be able to create a tactile drawing using other techniques. The techniques I know about all seem to be covered here: http://www.nctd.org.uk/MakingTG/ Hugh On Fri, 4 Feb 2011, Ekrem Koç wrote: Hello, Have Linux a software Tactile View too? Windows have a software: http://www.tactileview.com/ I need that, because I make a drawing for a friend, he is full deafblindness. Thank you and greeting, Ekrem -- 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
Re: Input method for users who can only operate (press/control/click) 1(or limited number of) key(s)
On Mon, 24 May 2010, Carlos Mayans wrote: Hey guys, this is my the first time I write to the list, so first of all my name is Carlos, I am from Spain and I have been working with people with different types of disabilities in Kolkata India for almost two years, mainly deaf and kids with cerebrl palsy. I was little surprised I couldn't find any software to work as an only 1 key input methods. This could be easily programmed, I am a software developer myself, but I have absolutely no idea if there are already people working on it, or anything related to this. I know of Dasher, which I've not tried on Linux: http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/dasher/ The book Beautiful Code (not here at the moment) has a chapter on the system Stephen Hawking uses, which is open source, but when I went to the site mentioned in the book the code had vanished. Maybe someone else knows whether it has moved or just died. Chapter 30 When a Button Is All That Connects You to the World http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596510046#toc There is also software out there which allows communication with a text interface using extended morse code, which may or may not be applicable. There is this: http://morseall.org/ and there was the morse 2000 project, but this seems to have only left traces on the net. Sorry if this issue has already been discussed before, and thank you in advance for your advices. Regards, Carlos. HTH Hugh -- Ubuntu-accessibility mailing list Ubuntu-accessibility@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-accessibility
Re: [OFF-TOPIC] Re: ideological speed bumps
On Sun, 16 May 2010, Tim Cross wrote: Hi Eric, I've added comments in-line below. However, this is probably beginning to get a little off topic for the list. Maybe take further discussion off list if you I beg to differ. This is an accessibility list, and these questions are surely fundamental to accessibility issues. This is about finding out how to deal with issues that affect all access technologies in an open source ecosystem. Most other questions get shunted out to the orca list, or the gnome list, etc, because they end up being too specific for this list. want to respond further. Alternatively, maybe you have some suggestions or ubuntu specific points that could be brought in to get things more on-topic? Alternatively, would you like to suggest a list that is better for this kind of question, given that it relates to open source accessibility issues? I'm not up-to-date enough with current VR issues to be able to provide any really constructive advice. However, I also understand how important it can be to have general discussion and possibly find the ideas or energy to carry things forward further. I'm happy to discuss further off list if you wish. regards, Tim Hugh -- Ubuntu-accessibility mailing list Ubuntu-accessibility@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-accessibility
Re: ideological speed bumps
One would have hoped that 19 years after the Americans with Disabilities Act, and 15 years after similar UK legislation was enacted, things would have improved. I wonder if the Electronic Frontier Foundation could use such legislation to get more cross-platform support from the large commercial interests. As for the This won't happen, because that application is commercial: producing an interface standard for Voice Recognition would allow the open source community to program to an interface without having to compromise with whatever is on the other side. VoiceXML is not it, because that is only for the voice response, weather in Boston, systems AFAIK. The incentive for vendors is that compliance to the interface is another feature to sell. A common interface would probably start as a lowest common denominator, so this would not solve the only one good (unfortunately commercial) system problem immediately. But a standard could drive innovation in some cases. This hasn't worked perfectly for HTML and browsers, but it has worked to some extent, I think. Hugh -- Ubuntu-accessibility mailing list Ubuntu-accessibility@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-accessibility
Re: Accessible mail clients
I've not had chance to maintain this list in ages, but something useful may lurk here: http://www.tech.dmu.ac.uk/~hgs/e-mail/#clients I was not driven by accessibility when I wrote it, and use large print rather than speech, so YMMV. You might find the curses based clients such as Alpine accessible. Alpine isn't on there (yet), it's at: http://www.washington.edu/alpine/ Hugh On Fri, 9 Apr 2010, David Sexton wrote: I am really getting fedup with evolution, which other mail clients are accessible with orca? David -- Ubuntu-accessibility mailing list Ubuntu-accessibility@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-accessibility
Re: vinux 2.1
There seems to be a developers list at vinux-developm...@googlegroups.com according to http://groups.google.com/group/vinux-development I see no evidence of a users list at the moment. HTH Hugh On Fri, 26 Feb 2010, Kenny Hitt wrote: Hi. The Vinux developers should have there own mailing list. In linux, setting up a mailing list is easy. Not sure of it's address, but this list is about Ubuntu and not vinux. Kenny On Fri, Feb 26, 2010 at 07:05:02AM -0500, chad wrote: Hi not sure where to post this I downloaded vinux 2.1 the big iso and can't get it installed. The cd spins and I get no speech. I had a sighted person read it and it said buffering and the numbers kept climbing. -- 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 -- Ubuntu-accessibility mailing list Ubuntu-accessibility@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-accessibility
Re: [orca-list] Making Ubuntu Software Center accessible
On Sat, 20 Feb 2010, Steve Lee wrote: I hope this article may contribute something here - it's not a 'how to' but more of a pointer to what and who http://www.oss-watch.ac.uk/resources/openaccessibility.xml There are some useful links in there about projects unfamiliar to me. I'll be exploring those further. Thank you. Hugh -- Ubuntu-accessibility mailing list Ubuntu-accessibility@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-accessibility
Re: [orca-list] Making Ubuntu Software Center accessible
I think there's a more fundamental question here. That is: Why are people still developing inaccessible software? The Americans With Disabilities Act dates back nearly two decades, the UK legislation is about 15 years old, and that's just the legal side of things, ignoring culture. So why aren't people catching up with this? I think there are a number of answers to this, but they include * Much of the information out there is about available applications and configuring them by/for the disabled user * There would seem to be nothing in the acceptance process which means that inaccessible applications are rejected for inclusion in GNU/Linux. [I don't know enough about that to be certain...] * A quick search shows little for the programmer along the lines of how to make your application accessible. I found Accerciser through http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/9991 but good though that is, it is rather after the event, as opposed to how to write in accessibility from the start. * Much of the material is pretty intimidating for someone starting out in terms of the number of things you have to cover. Just taking vision: speech access, braille access, large print access, the needs of colour blind people, be that red/green, blue/yellow, or total colour blindness. [Then there's deafblindness...] * The wider case for accessibility doesn't seem to be put forward enough. Much is said about full participation of the whole of society, but that won't get most people to jump at the chance to add accessibility. What seems to be left out is that something accessible is usually easier to script with another technology, because there are more hooks into it. Textual interfaces can be screen scraped easily, etc. A search for Accessibility Howto (a particularly blunt instrument for this sort of thing) only turns up this on the second page: http://www.faqs.org/docs/Linux-HOWTO/Accessibility-Dev-HOWTO.html and it is dated 2002, which is probably rather old now. I'd suggest that there is a need for people who know more about GNU/Linux accessibility than I do [1] to write about it for a wider audience to get the techniques out there. As a programmer this will benefit you, because you can do [...] as a result of the accessibility hooks being there. Etc. I don't think the problems will start to go away until more people are aware of how easy the easy things are. The difficult things will come later. Hugh [1] I don't know much about the programming of accessibility yet. I'm hoping this will change when (if?) I get more time. -- Ubuntu-accessibility mailing list Ubuntu-accessibility@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-accessibility
Re: Ubuntu-accessibility Digest, Vol 43, Issue 23
On Wed, 1 Jul 2009, Kenny Hitt wrote: Hi. Your asumption is wrong. The problem of systems not having internal speakers any more is a change in main stream production. In the past, a computer case included an internal speaker. That is no longer true. That fact was never advertised, so there isn't any way to know in advance if a new system will have a speaker or not. Usually, the answer is no. Installing one will require sighted help since you will need to know where to plug it into the mother board. Since you need sighted help, why not just let them read your screen for a few seconds to let you get accessibility started. This is more likely since Because they will only have to setup your system to use the (external?) speakers as the default once, rather than evey time you want accessibility started? almost anyone with sight can read a screen, but it takes some knowledge to know where to plug a speaker on a circuit board. Kenny Hugh On Wed, Jul 01, 2009 at 06:30:01PM +1000, Richard Horobin wrote: I support Petra Ritter's suggestion of beeping when ready. A person who's interested in accessibility issues will probably have a sound-producing component attached. If the beep helps, then that's a help, isn't it? Richard Horobin. -- 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 -- Ubuntu-accessibility mailing list Ubuntu-accessibility@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-accessibility
Re: Future of accessibility under Ubuntu
On Mon, 29 Jun 2009, Bill Cox wrote: I hope my criticism in this e-mail is taken as intended - constructive criticism, rather than pointless ranting. I would like to raise a [important points about important problems, strongly put, trimmed] I hope this is taken as a call to action. I don't mean to offend anyone. One of the themes of open source is that it is up to people to dive in and fix things, BUT at the same time we know programmers don't like maintenance work. That's because it's easier to write code than read someone else's code. [A topic of importance that should be left aside for now.] My question is this: given the need to get people to work on problems, and the inherent difficulties, what resources exist to help people who are interested to get started? I'm thinking that one thing that might help would be a FAQ for this list telling developers where to find info about accessibility bugs in particular, and pointers on how to get familiar with the territory, open problems that need exploration, even graduate research topics. There would need to be info for users as well. It would be good to know about tools which can collect accessibility bug info in one place automatically, trawling bugzillas, or at least have a wiki that holds this kind of thing. The wiki might be this one: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Accessibility What testing tools exist to help developers to avoid breaking accessibility? What can be done to make accessibility work more accessible? :-) HTH Hugh -- Ubuntu-accessibility mailing list Ubuntu-accessibility@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-accessibility
Re: Future of accessibility under Ubuntu
On Mon, 29 Jun 2009, Eric S. Johansson wrote: 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 A good goal, but not quite what I meant! I meant: how do we make the software development process which underpins that kind of work, more accessible? It looks pretty frightening from the outside: lots of subtleties about the interactions of different disabilities. Lots of subtleties about special devices. Interfaces and protocols not encountered elsewhere, I'd bet. So there's a lot to learn. 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. Yes, I've not even tried to dictate any significant amounts of code. It's all rather tedious with the punctuation. It might need a new language that avoids punctuation, but even COBOL has it's share of that! Hugh -- Ubuntu-accessibility mailing list Ubuntu-accessibility@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-accessibility
Re: does anyone know of a small live cd with software speech
On Sat, 13 Jun 2009, mike wrote: Hi, I am in need of a small rescue live CD that would have software speech. Grml is perfect, but they don't include the option for software speech on their median or small CD. There is a Ubuntu rescue CD, but it has no software speech on it. Do any of you know of any distro experimental or normal that has software speech using speakup or yasr on it? I've not explored this, but Knoppix is supposed to have speech. http://www.knopper.net/knoppix-adriane/index-en.html It links here, which claims the screen reader is enabled by default http://www.dedoimedo.com/computers/knoppix-adriane.html But, OTOH, ISTR that Knoppix ceased to fit on a CD after 5.x, though I could be wrong. Thanks Mike. HTH Hugh -- Ubuntu-accessibility mailing list Ubuntu-accessibility@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-accessibility
Re: I need a program
On Thu, 2 Oct 2008, Eric S. Johansson wrote: Hugh Sasse wrote: I'm not sure if this is anything near what you are looking for. I thought people used web forums for this sort of thing now. the only difference being that the old BBSs from the 1980s are faster and have a better user interface. I know it's damn near impossible to drive a web forum with speech recognition and pretty miserable just entering message text. I imagine that screen scraping for text-to-speech is just as bad. Agreed. It's bad enough with low vision, but when I used to visit Sight Village regularly I was given the impression audio browsers were catching up. I used to be on the ACCMAIL list (Accessing the Internet by Email) and got some bugs out of Arthur Secret's Agora program, and enhanced it to provide compression, base64 encoding, and a few other things. Since the departure from that area of Gerry Boyd the list has basically fizzled out. Agora didn't cope too well with forms, but there was Getweb if memory serves) that was better. There was also some work on a text browser called Netrik, but its very accessible web page http://netrik.sourceforge.net//?intro.html doesn't seem to have changed for a long time. We had a BBS running on an Olivetti 3b2 circa 1988, but I can't remember what it was called, and I think the people who were there then have now left. Maybe poking around the mustier bits of comp.sources.unix might turn up something. The only other thing I can suggest is you poke about in places where the Amateur Radio enthusiasts keep their Packet Radio software. I never got into that, but it was much lower bandwidth than the web, so is likely to be more accessible. Hugh -- Ubuntu-accessibility mailing list Ubuntu-accessibility@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-accessibility
Re: I need a program
On Wed, 1 Oct 2008, mike wrote: Hi, many of you probably remember the old BBS systems that ran in dos. Does anyone know if there is any BBS programs that run in Linux? Of course I need one that would be accessible with Orca or speakup if such software is out there. Thanks Mike. IIRC this was based on UUCP, so how support under linux is now, I'm not sure. I'm surprised the site is still there: http://www.fidonet.org/ I'm not sure if this is anything near what you are looking for. I thought people used web forums for this sort of thing now. Hugh -- Ubuntu-accessibility mailing list Ubuntu-accessibility@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-accessibility
Re: does anyone think a basic guide for new users is a good idea?
On Wed, 6 Aug 2008, mike coulombe wrote: [...] As a thanks I am willing to put together a basic guide for new users that will give them some basic information they can use to get started with orca and ubuntu. [...] Definitely a good idea. Trawling bookshops and the web there is little info out there. [...] I am open to suggestions on what people would like to see included in it. I'd like to know what support there is for people who prefer large print. Trying Ubuntu out a while back I had difficulties when I set the fonts to be large, and whilst I appreciated the existence of a magnifier, I felt it was rather limited in what it could do. Getting terminal windows setup for high contrast, low glare (Eg light on dark) with large print took a while as well, and I think when I tried Vim there was no colour support in the terminal I accessed. Syntax highlighting is great help for trapping absent small punctuation chars like `. Then there are the braille users. [My braille is dead slow, and I don't know 8-dot anyway.] This would be important for deafblind people as well. At present I won't be able to contribute anything to this, but the time will come. Thank you, Hugh -- Ubuntu-accessibility mailing list Ubuntu-accessibility@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-accessibility
Large print support?
I've had a chance to explore a Ubuntu system at the weekend, dual boot and also running on a Microsoft Virtual Machine. Booting straight into GNU/Linux worked very well, but I had some problems I'd like to report with the virtual machine. On the whole the interface was good, and I'm impressed with the effort to make the GUI modern and user-friendly When I went to the preferences setup to enlarge all the fonts to around 20 points, I found that the dialogue box was too big for the virtual machine window, even though I had stretched it as far as it would go. I could thus not get at the OK button to approve my large print settings. I'm wondering if making the whole panel scrollable would be a useful fix for that? Also, on the system (which I had not installed, and I'm not familiar with what is possible yet) there were no VI accessibility tools such as a magnifier, akin to the Microsoft magnifier. The accessibility options that I could see were for the keyboard mostly. I'm thinking that the way it was installed may well have resulted in missing tools. Are there more tools available? I had not really clicked that Ubuntu was based on debian. On firing up Vim I found that syntax highlighting is disabled, and on downloading a new runtime, etc, (which I had to do via another machine, not using apt-get) I still could not find a --with-features=big distribution. This seems an unusual choice (not for a linux intended to be really small, perhaps) because open source needs contributers, and anything that makes it easier for programmers is likely to increase that. Syntax highlighting seems to be the norm for editors these days. Yes, I can compile it myself of course, but there's a reason for using a packaging system... How would I determine if a --with-features=big package exists? Thank you, Hugh -- Ubuntu-accessibility mailing list Ubuntu-accessibility@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-accessibility
Re: Magnifer and touchpad in Kubuntu
Sorry for the delay in response -- been sent off site for a few days. On Wed, 28 Nov 2007, alan c wrote: Hugh Sasse wrote: I've been finding that when I move the mouse over some icons in order to magnify them, they are activated as if I have double-clicked on them. This is the touch pad 'Tapping' facility. I always turn it off, it drives me mad. The way I know to turn it off is by editing the file, essentially editing the value of maxtaptime Option MaxTapTime 0 the zero value stops the function. there is a link https://help.ubuntu.com/community/InputDevices that sounds like the thing. I've never got on with touchpads. I probably need to read more about how to use them (rolling one's fingertip on the pad seems to give finer control, but I prefer mice). Anyway this should help, I've not read that link yet. Maybe more questions later :-) Thank you. Hugh -- Ubuntu-accessibility mailing list Ubuntu-accessibility@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-accessibility
Magnifer and touchpad in Kubuntu
I've just started working on a laptop which I'm trying to make accessible for me, and it has Ubuntu, and is setup with KDE. At the moment I have no preferences for KDE or Gnome, as I've not really used either successfully. I normally use Solaris, and nowadays normally from a Windows machine using PuTTY. My problems are that I need about 4x or greater magnification, usually 4x will do, and that I've been having problems with the touchpad. I've been finding that when I move the mouse over some icons in order to magnify them, they are activated as if I have double-clicked on them. I don't know if this is some function of the touchpad on the toshiba touchpad or of some configuration somewhere, but I'd like this behaviour to stop. I have enough difficulty positioning the cursor accurately with the touchpad as it is, and it may be as a result that I'm pressing too hard. Trying to use a separate mouse, I have the mouse lock up (on logout) so I'm not confident about that working properly with all programs. Now, the magnifier, I can get it to display with enough magnification, but I can't seem to control the size of magnified display; I can set it to doc with the top of the screen but I can't vary it's vertical height. Maybe there's a configuration file I can set. I've tried to find stuff in the manual (man(1) command) and on the web sites, to no avail. Can anyone point me at specific docs for these, please? Thank you, Hugh -- Ubuntu-accessibility mailing list Ubuntu-accessibility@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-accessibility
