Re: Accessability in Edubuntu
The other name for thin client is dumb terminal. That means you get a keyboard; a screen, a network connection, and nothing else. No memory; no hard drive, no floppies no speakers, no connection for refreshable braille display, and no way to do screen magnification without additional hardware. Not exactly. You need memory, you can have a floppy drive, you can have speakers. There is no need for a physical hard drive because everything lives in RAM. If you need extra swap space nbd is available. Thin Clients aren't exactly dumb terminals, they have become much smarter. I have not worked with braille displays or screen magnification so I cannot speak to that. I know about this stuff because a system that will be expanding in the coming years uses citrix Luckily Linux thin clients aren't Citrix :-) For what it is worth, I have been playing with getting text to speech to work in our thin client environment with no luck (Edubuntu Feisty). So I tried to enable it on my stand alone Gutsy Desktop, still no luck (Edubuntu Gutsy). However I cannot be certain that I am trying to set this up correctly. There doesn't seem to be any step by step documentation for this. I have read the manuals but they seem vague. I simply want to be able to take and Edubuntu Desktop and enable text to speech for OpenOffice and Firefox mainly. I guess I did have it working temporarily in Gutsy, but they my machine slowed down and started freezing. So maybe there are still some bugs that need working out. I haven't had the time to trouble shoot any further. Jim -- This message has been scanned for viruses and dangerous content by the Cotter Technology Department, and is believed to be clean. -- Ubuntu-accessibility mailing list Ubuntu-accessibility@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-accessibility
RE: Accessability in Edubuntu
Thanks to all who replied. However, and this may well be my fault, I'm looking at putting Edubuntu on a stand alone PC for use by my children, so the question of networking the resources is not necessary. However, the information exchange has proved useful and interesting. So to confirm, on a stand alone PC running Edubuntu it should come with Orca as part of the Live CD? Ian -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Behalf Of Steve Lee Sent: 02 October 2007 10:35 To: Jude DaShiell Cc: ubuntu-accessibility@lists.ubuntu.com Subject: Re: Accessability in Edubuntu On 02/10/2007, Jude DaShiell [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I can tell you exactly how well orca will work in a thin client environment and I can explain why. Orca requires a thick client to work at all, and it requires broad band access. Without those two components in place it will not work at all. I can't comment on Orca so I'll just make a couple of general points as thin clients need to support AT as well. In the UK education section (schoolforge.org.uk) thin client is one of the key advantages of FOSS that can be promoted (saving cash, ease admin). I have limited knowledge but believe the situation should not be as bad as you present. I just needs some concentrated effort. * X, (the linux display system) is naturally thin client. LTSP just gets it going and in usual desktop situations the display happens to be on the same box as the client software. Thus most programs will 'just work' thin client as far as display and common input is concerned unless they have worked around it somehow. The Accessibility APIs also work in this distributed model * I understand sound now works with LTSP. * As far as performance/bandwidth is concerned yes thin client pushes the load onto infrastructure and servers. The X protocol is pretty good and optimisations are available (NX, ndiyo). The graphics packages that many programs and widget sets use work hard to reduce bandwidth too (e.g cairo). www.schoolforge.org.uk/index.php/Assistive_Technology_with_Terminal_Servers -- Steve Lee -- Open Source Assistive Technology Software PowerTalk - your presentations can speak for themselves www.fullmeasure.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: Accessability in Edubuntu
I can tell you exactly how well orca will work in a thin client environment and I can explain why. Orca requires a thick client to work at all, and it requires broad band access. Without those two components in place it will not work at all. This is why. The other name for thin client is dumb terminal. That means you get a keyboard; a screen, a network connection, and nothing else. No memory; no hard drive, no floppies no speakers, no connection for refreshable braille display, and no way to do screen magnification without additional hardware. With a thick client also known as a pc equipped with all the dangerous stuff listed above the thin client/dumb terminal hasn't got, maybe orca can run provided it can talk to the environment on the other end through a pipe. Well jaws and window-eyes work that way at least require pipes. I know about this stuff because a system that will be expanding in the coming years uses citrix where I work and they're most likely going to take it to narrow band so screen reader users will need to use dos or command line linux if required to access that system. Why dos rather than windows and why command line instead of X in Linux? Simple, all that pixel grabbing the graphical user environments do to figure out what to communicate to you takes up band width since they're pulling it off the net constantly. Dos and Linux ommand line applications only need characters not pixels and for every symbol on the screen to get generated that's 143 fewer pieces of information for dos and command line linux than it is for any of the graphical user interfaces. If I'm not mistaken 12x12 pixels in a character but I probably ought to take the smallest screen resolution and do the math on that vertical*horizontal/2,000. All of this stuff was known and documented as far back as 2001 and put out on the web. I found a paper by a writer from R.N.I.B. with this information in it earlier this year. The reason for using narrow band is to help security. With minimal resources available and minimal speeds possible because of minimal resources a network take over even by someone who managed to tap into the right network cable becomes infeasible. On Tue, 2 Oct 2007, Luke Yelavich wrote: -BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA1 On Tue, Oct 02, 2007 at 08:12:17AM EST, Ian Pascoe wrote: Hi Can anyone confirm whether Edubuntu, which I believe ships with the Gnome desktop, has Orca and associated components pre-packaged within the Live CD, or if it has to be downloaded afterwards? I believe that orca does come on the edubuntu CD, but I am not sure how well, if at all, it works in a thin client environment. - -- Luke Yelavich GPG key: 0xD06320CE (http://www.themuso.com/themuso-gpg-key.txt) Email MSN: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Jabber: [EMAIL PROTECTED] -BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE- Version: GnuPG v1.4.6 (GNU/Linux) iD8DBQFHAZrAjVefwtBjIM4RAiWrAKDcvzB4mWNwLR2qNB10lZQy5/qITACfcDOP GWZgyckYdjzYQ14dCAzgLPc= =hj65 -END PGP SIGNATURE- -- 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: Accessability in Edubuntu
On 02/10/2007, Jude DaShiell [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I can tell you exactly how well orca will work in a thin client environment and I can explain why. Orca requires a thick client to work at all, and it requires broad band access. Without those two components in place it will not work at all. I can't comment on Orca so I'll just make a couple of general points as thin clients need to support AT as well. In the UK education section (schoolforge.org.uk) thin client is one of the key advantages of FOSS that can be promoted (saving cash, ease admin). I have limited knowledge but believe the situation should not be as bad as you present. I just needs some concentrated effort. * X, (the linux display system) is naturally thin client. LTSP just gets it going and in usual desktop situations the display happens to be on the same box as the client software. Thus most programs will 'just work' thin client as far as display and common input is concerned unless they have worked around it somehow. The Accessibility APIs also work in this distributed model * I understand sound now works with LTSP. * As far as performance/bandwidth is concerned yes thin client pushes the load onto infrastructure and servers. The X protocol is pretty good and optimisations are available (NX, ndiyo). The graphics packages that many programs and widget sets use work hard to reduce bandwidth too (e.g cairo). www.schoolforge.org.uk/index.php/Assistive_Technology_with_Terminal_Servers -- Steve Lee -- Open Source Assistive Technology Software PowerTalk - your presentations can speak for themselves www.fullmeasure.co.uk -- Ubuntu-accessibility mailing list Ubuntu-accessibility@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-accessibility
Re: Accessability in Edubuntu
hi, Am Montag, den 01.10.2007, 23:12 +0100 schrieb Ian Pascoe: Can anyone confirm whether Edubuntu, which I believe ships with the Gnome desktop, has Orca and associated components pre-packaged within the Live CD, or if it has to be downloaded afterwards? i just tested it on a gutsy client and apprently it has the sound device hardcoded ... in gutsy we have three possibilities to transfer sound to the client, the top layer is a virtual alsa device (which works fine for all other apps, so i'd somewhat had expected it to work, but apparently i'm wrong) ... there is also a pulseaudio tunnel to the client (in fact thats the layer the alsa device sits on top of vial libasound2-plugins) which you can use directly as well indeed. and as third we have an esound emulation of pulseaudio running on the thin client and teh ESPEAKER variable set in teh users session to guarantee backwards compatibility. apparently the portaudio library orca uses in the backend isnt capable of making use of the virtual alsa device here and the only other fallback this library offers seems to be oss. ciao oli signature.asc Description: Dies ist ein digital signierter Nachrichtenteil -- Ubuntu-accessibility mailing list Ubuntu-accessibility@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-accessibility
Re: Accessability in Edubuntu
I did the research, reason is we now have citrix where I work and this was work connected. If I were in the least degree wrong given the distribution my research results was given I'm sure my supervisor would have told me long ago. On Tue, 2 Oct 2007, Steve Lee wrote: On 02/10/2007, Jude DaShiell [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I can tell you exactly how well orca will work in a thin client environment and I can explain why. Orca requires a thick client to work at all, and it requires broad band access. Without those two components in place it will not work at all. I can't comment on Orca so I'll just make a couple of general points as thin clients need to support AT as well. In the UK education section (schoolforge.org.uk) thin client is one of the key advantages of FOSS that can be promoted (saving cash, ease admin). I have limited knowledge but believe the situation should not be as bad as you present. I just needs some concentrated effort. * X, (the linux display system) is naturally thin client. LTSP just gets it going and in usual desktop situations the display happens to be on the same box as the client software. Thus most programs will 'just work' thin client as far as display and common input is concerned unless they have worked around it somehow. The Accessibility APIs also work in this distributed model * I understand sound now works with LTSP. * As far as performance/bandwidth is concerned yes thin client pushes the load onto infrastructure and servers. The X protocol is pretty good and optimisations are available (NX, ndiyo). The graphics packages that many programs and widget sets use work hard to reduce bandwidth too (e.g cairo). www.schoolforge.org.uk/index.php/Assistive_Technology_with_Terminal_Servers -- Steve Lee -- Open Source Assistive Technology Software PowerTalk - your presentations can speak for themselves www.fullmeasure.co.uk -- Ubuntu-accessibility mailing list Ubuntu-accessibility@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-accessibility
Re: Accessability in Edubuntu
hi, Am Montag, den 01.10.2007, 23:12 +0100 schrieb Ian Pascoe: Can anyone confirm whether Edubuntu, which I believe ships with the Gnome desktop, has Orca and associated components pre-packaged within the Live CD, or if it has to be downloaded afterwards? i just tested it on a gutsy client and apprently it has the sound device hardcoded ... in gutsy we have three possibilities to transfer sound to the client, the top layer is a virtual alsa device (which works fine for all other apps, so i'd somewhat had expected it to work, but apparently i'm wrong) ... there is also a pulseaudio tunnel to the client (in fact thats the layer the alsa device sits on top of vial libasound2-plugins) which you can use directly as well indeed. and as third we have an esound emulation of pulseaudio running on the thin client and teh ESPEAKER variable set in teh users session to guarantee backwards compatibility. apparently the portaudio library orca uses in the backend isnt capable of making use of the virtual alsa device here and the only other fallback this library offers seems to be oss. ciao oli signature.asc Description: Dies ist ein digital signierter Nachrichtenteil -- Ubuntu-accessibility mailing list Ubuntu-accessibility@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-accessibility
Re: Accessability in Edubuntu
-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA1 On Tue, Oct 02, 2007 at 08:12:17AM EST, Ian Pascoe wrote: Hi Can anyone confirm whether Edubuntu, which I believe ships with the Gnome desktop, has Orca and associated components pre-packaged within the Live CD, or if it has to be downloaded afterwards? I believe that orca does come on the edubuntu CD, but I am not sure how well, if at all, it works in a thin client environment. - -- Luke Yelavich GPG key: 0xD06320CE (http://www.themuso.com/themuso-gpg-key.txt) Email MSN: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Jabber: [EMAIL PROTECTED] -BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE- Version: GnuPG v1.4.6 (GNU/Linux) iD8DBQFHAZrAjVefwtBjIM4RAiWrAKDcvzB4mWNwLR2qNB10lZQy5/qITACfcDOP GWZgyckYdjzYQ14dCAzgLPc= =hj65 -END PGP SIGNATURE- -- Ubuntu-accessibility mailing list Ubuntu-accessibility@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-accessibility
