Re: idea for the installer

2006-09-27 Thread Krister Ekstrom
Hi folks,
I don't think the problem is the installer being accessible or not, at
least in Ubuntu, the graphical installer works very well, at least if
you have a hard drive dedicated to Linux. The thing that can be tricky,
or rather that is tricky is that speecha and braille don't follow when
you switch to being a root user from a regular user. You'll have to kill
Orca as a regular user and then start it again as root, and this can
sometimes cause problems. What would be good was if there was a way to
smoothly switch speech with the user so that one could switch users
without losing assistive technology and i think this is being worked on.
Please feel free to correct me if i'm wrong.
/Krister

On Wed, 2006-09-27 at 09:38 +0300, Veli-Pekka Tätilä wrote:
> mike coulombe wrote:
> > but if there is a real problem getting orca to work with the install
> > program. How about a automatic installer. 
> I think that's a great idea especially for newbies who do want to go with 
> the defaults. About the only setting I changed myself was the locale FInland 
> that is. Based on that a smart installer should be able to figure out my 
> time zone and keyboard, although there might not be a 1to1 mapping for all 
> the other countries.
> 
> I've heard there might already be an automated deployment system for Debian, 
> which is called I believe automated install (kickstart in Redhat). I've 
> never used the thing, though.
> 
> It would  be even better if the user could customize the setup. HACking some 
> well commented config file to do that might be an acceptable alternative 
> similarly to apps like doxygen for C plus plus programmers or the HTML Tidy 
> manual and config file for Web authors.
> 
> Personally, you guessed it, I would rather do this via some GUI preferably 
> mirroring that of the installer as much as is practical. The only OS in 
> which I've done that myself and really liked it was Win98, though.
> 
> For Windows users, and I guess most people are switching from windows due to 
> the dominance and long-term development of apps like Jaws, Eloquence and 
> Zoom Text, there's another catch. That is you cannot generally make a good 
> accessible Windows GUI with Linux GUis like TK or GTK, or at least I've 
> never seen any. Maybe a cross platform solution with ports to various OSes 
> and GUI libs, if the users would like to do this customization before they 
> boot to the OS. Or some console affair written with a GUI screen readre 
> friendly text mode and ANSI C. AS to what's GUI reader friendly, little or 
> no ASCII graphics and using the standard cursor or something that's at least 
> shaped like a vertical bar for easy tracking.
> 
> Or if the live CD approach is prevalent, one could do this customization in 
> some specialty distro. Maybe it would fit on most USB sticks and you could 
> at the very least easily write out the changes on some removable media. On 
> the other hand, if the live CD could be made to speak the installer, most 
> people who don't have to deploy Linux on multiple machines, could just as 
> well use the speaking installer directly.
> 
> Regarding the defaults, if this is specific to folks needing accessibility, 
> I think the settings should reflect that. For ages I've been wishing for a 
> LInux distro that just worked in terms of accessibility. SOmething with as 
> many CLI and GUI readers, multi-lingual speech synths and accessible 
> versions (GTK2 or self-voicing) as is practical. Too bad the Oralux project 
> hasn't advanced all that much.
> 
> I think it would be great if Gnome had the assistive technology support 
> enabled by default. I cannot see why it already doesn't, in fact, unless 
> accessibility is a major performance or stability hit. OS X has the right 
> attitude in this, in that a user can just start using Voice Over, and when 
> he or she does that, speech, full keyboard access and the accessibility API 
> just works. In other words, no need  to configure anything. Besides, 
> configuring is difficult for many if you don't have speech or at least good 
> full-screen magnification preferrably with font smoothing (for truetype 
> stuff).
> 
> -- 
> With kind regards Veli-Pekka Tätilä ([EMAIL PROTECTED])
> Accessibility, game music, synthesizers and programming:
> http://www.student.oulu.fi/~vtatila/ 
> 
> 

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Re: idea for the installer

2006-09-26 Thread Veli-Pekka Tätilä
mike coulombe wrote:
> but if there is a real problem getting orca to work with the install
> program. How about a automatic installer. 
I think that's a great idea especially for newbies who do want to go with 
the defaults. About the only setting I changed myself was the locale FInland 
that is. Based on that a smart installer should be able to figure out my 
time zone and keyboard, although there might not be a 1to1 mapping for all 
the other countries.

I've heard there might already be an automated deployment system for Debian, 
which is called I believe automated install (kickstart in Redhat). I've 
never used the thing, though.

It would  be even better if the user could customize the setup. HACking some 
well commented config file to do that might be an acceptable alternative 
similarly to apps like doxygen for C plus plus programmers or the HTML Tidy 
manual and config file for Web authors.

Personally, you guessed it, I would rather do this via some GUI preferably 
mirroring that of the installer as much as is practical. The only OS in 
which I've done that myself and really liked it was Win98, though.

For Windows users, and I guess most people are switching from windows due to 
the dominance and long-term development of apps like Jaws, Eloquence and 
Zoom Text, there's another catch. That is you cannot generally make a good 
accessible Windows GUI with Linux GUis like TK or GTK, or at least I've 
never seen any. Maybe a cross platform solution with ports to various OSes 
and GUI libs, if the users would like to do this customization before they 
boot to the OS. Or some console affair written with a GUI screen readre 
friendly text mode and ANSI C. AS to what's GUI reader friendly, little or 
no ASCII graphics and using the standard cursor or something that's at least 
shaped like a vertical bar for easy tracking.

Or if the live CD approach is prevalent, one could do this customization in 
some specialty distro. Maybe it would fit on most USB sticks and you could 
at the very least easily write out the changes on some removable media. On 
the other hand, if the live CD could be made to speak the installer, most 
people who don't have to deploy Linux on multiple machines, could just as 
well use the speaking installer directly.

Regarding the defaults, if this is specific to folks needing accessibility, 
I think the settings should reflect that. For ages I've been wishing for a 
LInux distro that just worked in terms of accessibility. SOmething with as 
many CLI and GUI readers, multi-lingual speech synths and accessible 
versions (GTK2 or self-voicing) as is practical. Too bad the Oralux project 
hasn't advanced all that much.

I think it would be great if Gnome had the assistive technology support 
enabled by default. I cannot see why it already doesn't, in fact, unless 
accessibility is a major performance or stability hit. OS X has the right 
attitude in this, in that a user can just start using Voice Over, and when 
he or she does that, speech, full keyboard access and the accessibility API 
just works. In other words, no need  to configure anything. Besides, 
configuring is difficult for many if you don't have speech or at least good 
full-screen magnification preferrably with font smoothing (for truetype 
stuff).

-- 
With kind regards Veli-Pekka Tätilä ([EMAIL PROTECTED])
Accessibility, game music, synthesizers and programming:
http://www.student.oulu.fi/~vtatila/ 


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idea for the installer

2006-09-26 Thread mike coulombe
Hi, I don't know how hard this would be to do,
but if there is a real problem getting orca to work with the install program.
How about a automatic installer. It could assume you want to use the whole 
drive if it is blank,
and if it sees a partition it would use the largest free space.
Just a thought, Mike.
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