It's not that I don't care about new users coming to Linux from Windows.
It's more that I care about the new computer user who's starting with
Linux. Why shouldn't they have the most intuitive set of key bindings
possible? What about those that have been using Orca all along? How
about those wh
I don't think nerds or blind nerds are unique in this sense at all. In
fact, since the blind suffer so much from prejudice, I'm always
surprised by how prejudiced the blind themselves can be about the blind,
although I shouldn't be, since I think that's just human nature. Anyone
who thinks the
Actually a screen reader using f12 to tell the time does make it a standard
probably unique to that screen reader. Standards are loved by many because
there are so many standards from which to choose. There is a huge difference
between a standard and the standard; those multiple standards lovers
I see this a lot too.
I happen to be a member of both the ACB and NFB. Yeah, I know, its rare. I use
both orgs as tools to get what I need done.
Now, what I have found among the blind is that a lot of us are very anal
retentive. It may have a lot to do with the fact that we have to be super
or
Sometimes that slogan about the perfect being the enemy of the good is
useful, sometimes not. In this instance, I'm inclined to think it's not.
Sighted people as a group disagree on a great many things, and vary a
great deal on the willingness to compromise. It's the same with blind
folks, a
So you are asserting that users would prefer insert+t to F12? Suppose I
were to provide you with evidence that that is untrue. Would that make
any difference to you? Suppose I were to show you that the majority of
users would prefer there to be a standard set of shortcut keys for the
most commo
That's what I've thought. Also, it seems to me as a matter of equal
access that we should have speech and Braille access as close to the
time as possible when sighted folks can see action on their monitors.
If that requires that our speech/Braille output software be in kernel
space, then it sh
All of this criticicism of Speakup, however valid, avoids the fact that
Speakup has nonetheless been available as a staging module with Debian,
for example, as well as Arch, if I'm not mistaken. It is not available
with Fedora. It then became unavailable even from rpmfusion, and I've
not hear
Is there a set of instructions for doing this?
Al
On 04/24/2017 04:46 PM, Linux for blind general discussion wrote:
This is Luke Yelavich, reply below.
On Mon, Apr 24, 2017 at 09:23:19PM AEST, Linux for blind general discussion
wrote:
Screen readers cannot give boot messages anyways, with so
But the world doesn't have a problem with too much unity. You say,
"unity behind the wrong philosophy very well might give us a worse
world, not a better one." But it's not as if that has been a huge
problem for the blind community, developers of accessibility software,
or the combination of th
I know next to nothing about the NFB and ACB, and I could've sworn
there was an AFB in there somewhere, but unless one organization is
hoarding resources for their own members, refuse to let members be
part of other organizations, or abuse IP law to the point only those
willing to jump through thei
I just don't understand how you can fail to see how judgemental you are
being. My hardware speech synth is not obsolete as proven by the very
fact that I use it all the time and the speakup code is being actively
developed as we speak. It's just a different choice I made. I have very
good reas
I don't think I disagree with you much, but I made that point and others
in the context of a lot of messages. Also, I did not say that there is
too much unity, only that some kinds of unity are better than others.
Al
On 04/25/2017 11:22 AM, Linux for blind general discussion wrote:
But t
The decision to disable the staging tree in Fedora has nothing to do
with a lack of interest in accessibility. It has everything to do with
security and stability, as staging is considered by the kernel
developers to be unstable and not fully known to be secure.
Regarding documentation, I have
Maybe the Debian kernel's less stable than Fedora's, but I've never
heard that. Then again, there are a lot of things I've not heard.
(grimace)
I wasn't talking about outdated documentation, but the ability to get to
it in the first place from
www.fedoraproject.org
or, more precisely, f
I agree with this post. Sure it would be great if all blind people
agreed with one another, especially when it came to issues concerning
the blind, but I think this is unrealistic. In this sense, the blind are
no different then the general public, and as nice as it would be if the
blind were be
Nobody said anything about all blind people agreeing about anything. The
issue is whether we are hurting ourselves with our inability to
cooperate. Even if you don't believe that the infighting in the blind
community is worse than it is in the general public, that's no reason to
just accept the
I actually didn't make that assertion. All I stated was that we just
shouldn't assume that the way JAWS does something is automatically the
best way something could be done. Let the developers come up with new
and innovative ways of doing things, such as new key bindings or totally
different wa
Wow, that's really interesting to know.
--
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Email: r.d.t.pra...@gmail.com
Long days and pleasant nights!
Linux for blind general discussion writes:
> Nobody said anything about all blind people agreeing about anything.
> The issue is whether we are hurti
Tony Baechler here.
You make my point, exactly! All of the BSDs, Windows, and who knows what
else ship Gnome. Orca is part of Gnome. Therefore, they all ship Orca if
they ship a complete Gnome environment. That doesn't mean they care about
accessibility. That means they ship Orca because it's
Tony Baechler here.
On 4/24/2017 5:01 AM, Linux for blind general discussion wrote:
The fact is when I visit websites sometimes, Orca behaves much less good
than NVDA, less reactive, freeze, etc.
Can you give specific examples? I generally get very fast page loads with
NVDA and the latest F
Tony Baechler here.
Kyle, first, from a different post, I have no feelings about Arch. I don't
know if they care about accessibility or not. I would think if they do, they
would make Talking Arch official, but there are probably technical issues.
Why they can't do like Slackware, Debian and Ub
Tony Baechler here.
Thanks for the Fenrir link. I'll go get it. I've looked at the SBL source,
or what I could find of it. No, it doesn't need a kernel module. The problem
is it's tied into Knoppix, so I think would be difficult to package. It's
mostly bash scripts which I guess are a talking
Tony Baechler here.
I totally agree about the blind community. You forgot the third group. We
have the ACB, NFB and those who don't care and won't join either. I'm seeing
more of those. However, no, F12 isn't the standard. Window-Eyes uses
Insert+T. Should Insert+T read the title as with NVDA
Tony Baechler here.
Kyle, I find your rant amusing. Back in the good old days of DOS, I used
Vocal-Eyes. Guess what the key for time was. No, not F12. Actually, it was
undefined. Do you know what I picked on my own? Ctrl-F12. I was very happy
with it. It's way out of the way and doesn't interf
Tony Baechler here.
On 4/24/2017 11:23 AM, Linux for blind general discussion wrote:
Regardless of the method used, I'm not sure boot messages are all that
important to the average user or even the average power user. The
functionality might be useful to some sysadmins, but I'm not convinced
the
Tony Baechler here.
On 4/24/2017 1:46 PM, Linux for blind general discussion wrote:
This is Luke Yelavich, reply below.
On Mon, Apr 24, 2017 at 09:23:19PM AEST, Linux for blind general discussion
wrote:
Screen readers cannot give boot messages anyways, with software speech.
Actually, with t
For what it's worth, Aptitude lists libc6 and libusb as the only
dependencies for SBL, though I'll admit a kernel module would explain
why I've never had any luck switching from a knoppix custom kernel to
a stock Debian kernel when Knoppix is 90+% debian packages with a few
Knoppix specific things.
Addendum to my previous post:
Regarding boot messages, even back when I could see, assuming
whichever distro I was using didn't cover them with a splash screen, I
can't say they were ever all that useful when things went wrong to the
point of things not booting. In most cases, I usually used such
#+OPTIONS: latex:t toc:nil H:3
So, if Debian is all we have, pretty much, who cares about
accessibility, what is there for those who want a clean, but
up-to-date system other than Arch? As a user, of Emacs with
Emacspeak and Voxin mostly, I find Arch stable enough to
Tony and all,
I myself am completely opposed to a screen reader being locked into a
kernel, and have been for many years, for very good, technical,
non-political reasons. Text mode is exactly this: text mode. The layout
of the entire screen is available as plain text and some other character
c
Tony,
If you found bash scripts, rather than sbl, you probably found the
Adrienne[spelling] menu system. SBL is the screen reader that should be
running as a daemon before the menu system starts, although I can't say
I'm well versed on the subject, as I found the Adrienne menu system to
be too
Hi,
On Wed, 26 Apr 2017 18:07:27
>-0400, Linux for blind general >
> In any case, I do recall SBL, formerly called SUSE Blinux, and
> possibly SUSE Blind Linux before that, being at least in early
> OpenSUSE. If it's not using any kernel modules or patches, it may be
> usable in other operati
Thank you for additional information on SBl and the link.
I have no idea how old the version of SBL I'm using is, but as far as
I'm concerned, it has yet to show it's age, and if I had a bug to
report, it would be that it isn't available precompiled for more
distributions. I don't have much experi
Eric Oyen here…
looks like some good points all around on this posting. For the most part, a
kernel level speech interface can be a good thing, except when it isn't. What I
wouldn't mind seeing is the addition of a speak up type module for EFI. The
reason for this as that I might need to be abl
But, again, Kyle, the serial console is also kernel dependent. You're
simply depending on a different set of developers. You could switch to a
user space screen reader once the host is done booting just as you
switch to a getty once the boot is done.
-- John Heim
On 04/26/2017 04:52 PM, Linux
I clearly recall stating that the serial console is *not* kernel
dependent. I clearly stated that I can get *boot loader* messages using
my computer's serial console, which are printed to the output device
long before the kernel starts. If my kernel fails to start for any
reason, I know it, and
Oh wow thanks for the link to the SBL source! I wasn't aware it still
existed anywhere other than old OpenSUSE and Knoppix. Hopefully I can
get this working on Arch and possibly Fedora as well. If it works, there
should be no objections on technical grounds for getting it packaged for
many dist
Tony Baechler here.
Your comments again emphasize the need for a nonprofit organization. I
wouldn't worry too much about the money. Funding will happen once the word
gets out. Oh, it takes time and it won't be immediate, but it can and will
happen. What we need is a grant writer. The governmen
I agree with you, but when you say schools, you mean the government.
They provide the majority of funding schools use for that sort of thing.
I did not think of a grant writer. That sounds like a good place to
start.
--Kelly Prescott
On Thu, 27 Apr 2017, Linux for blind general discussion w
Hmm. Facebook groups? Perhaps? I could handle that, if it please ya.
Linux for the blind. Grant stuff, though, I’ll probably have to
leave for those who know about petitioning and such. However,
NVDA got plenty of grant money from Mozilla and Adobe, so we
could start
#+OPTIONS: latex:t toc:nil H:3
For me, in school, I started out with Windows XP, lol. Shows how young I
am, only 22, 23 on May 7. But the future is for the young,
mostly, although nowadays the old get older, lol. I’ve never
represented a group of users or people... Well I di
As of four years ago the Carrol Center was teaching only windows. I
know this as a Friend came in as did many others from different
countries. The goal was to learn what to teach blind folks in the
country they came from. Am I correct in thinking that Carrol center is
all funded from Washington
I would argue that the pronunciation of symbols should most certainly be
handled by the synthesizer rather than any intermediate layer. Letting
the intermediate layers handle symbol pronunciation will only cause lots
of problems similar to the "tiflda" problem we have in Speakup to this
day. Mo
Sure, let synthesizers handle ASCII text, but give synthesizers the
textual pronunciation of Unicode characters, such as smiling face.
--
Sent from Discordia using Gnus for Emacs.
Email: r.d.t.pra...@gmail.com
Long days and pleasant nights!
Linux for blind general discussion writes:
> I
Saying a serial console is not kernel dependent is inaccurate and
misleading. The part that displays the kernel boot messages is
absolutely kernel dependent. I think you mean that you can get messages
even earlier by, as a seperate step, configuring a serial console in
the boot loader, right?
I don't understand the advantage an ASCII speech synthesizer has over
a unicode speech synthesizer, or the advantage of having an
intermediary between synthesizer and screen reader. Maybe I'm missing
something, but I would think a hypothetical espeak-unicode that could
work directly with Orca would
Aall the money IAVIT has ever gotten has come from knowing someone. Most
corporate foundations don't even take unsolicited grant applications.
You have to get a sponsor in the company who can write the application
for you. And you kind of have to allow them to drive the project. There
may be ex
well, the fact is, Speech Dispatcher is what Orca currently uses, so
that Orca doesn’t have to keep up with changes to eSpeak’s
functions. After all, having many communications between
synthesizers is why Emacspeak’s eSpeak support is so bad in the
first place, becau
At this point, speech-dispatcher is not designed to be a text processor,
as correct me if I'm wrong, but I do believe it assumes that supported
synthesizers already have built in text processing capabilities. Any
pronunciation handling in either speech-dispatcher or a screen reader
should handl
Then we'd better get eSpeak supporting Unicode pronunciation before I
can confidently recommend anything besides Emacspeak to younger
generations. Otherwise, they’ll turn back to iOS, and Voiceover,
which can speak Emoji and such, pretty quickly. I know, I’m not
a de
The boot messages I receive from my computer before the kernel starts
are piped out through a serial port automatically, and need no special
configuration to display them. I just hooked up a uart cable to the
header on one computer and the USB port on another and ran tinyserial's
com utility on
Kyle, it is just your opinion that a screen reader should not be in the
kernel. And your reasoning for saying that amounts to that it shouldn't
be in the kernel. You are making a meaningless distinction between a
serial console and a screen reader. What difference does it make if
there is a har
Linux for blind general discussion writes:
> Sure, let synthesizers handle ASCII text, but give synthesizers the
> textual pronunciation of Unicode characters, such as smiling face.
Chris Brannon here.
This works fine if you assume that everyone wants English and the
English names for Unic
On Fri, Apr 28, 2017 at 02:27:12AM AEST, Linux for blind general discussion
wrote:
> At this point, speech-dispatcher is not designed to be a text processor, as
> correct me if I'm wrong, but I do believe it assumes that supported
> synthesizers already have built in text processing capabilities.
#+OPTIONS: latex:t toc:nil H:3
However way we do it, it sure needs doing if we want wide adoption of
Linux by the young blind, who /expect/ it to work.
--
Sent from Discordia using Gnus for Emacs.
Email: r.d.t.pra...@gmail.com
Long days and pleasant nights!
Linux for blind general discuss
According to r.d.t.prater:
# Otherwise, they’ll turn back to iOS, and Voiceover,
# which can speak Emoji and such, pretty quickly.
Not quite. I happen to know that Android and Google's speech synthesizer
can speak emojis as well, and has had such capability for some time. On
my Android dev
Good. Any work with speech dispatcher will go a long way.
--
Sent from Discordia using Gnus for Emacs.
Email: r.d.t.pra...@gmail.com
Long days and pleasant nights!
Linux for blind general discussion writes:
> On Fri, Apr 28, 2017 at 02:27:12AM AEST, Linux for blind general
> discussion wrote:
>
Sure, but if eSpeak cannot read Emoji and such, and we want new users to
use the web, they’ll quickly see that as "just another thing to
file a bug about and hope some one will fix it." Although,
people on the audio games forum are getting into Linux, and
don’t seem
But we're talking about attracting blind users, right? Shells and
terminals are more natural for us than GUIs. Instructing the computer
is far more intuitive than pretending that it's a two-dimensional
surface with pictures on it.
Amanda
On 4/27/17, Linux for blind general discussion wrote:
> Ac
Hi,
Terminals exclude blind people for the remaining of society. It
requieres real computing skills. Rejected by many users who use computer
just to work. Terminal is unable to make the user have benefit with
modern Web techno. Well, it's a geek interface, amazing but not for
everybody. Just for
According to John Heim:
# Kyle, it is just your opinion that a screen reader should not be in the
# kernel. And your reasoning for saying that amounts to that it shouldn't
# be in the kernel.
I'm sorry you have such a hard time fully reading what I wrote. I did
indeed give a fair number of reaso
Yes, that's true, and it's why some like the Emacspeak "audio desktop"
with its ability of playing media and presenting structured and
formatted text which no other interface has come close to yet.
Sure, Audacious is nice, and Emacs has no way of dealing with
Youtube
According to Amanda:
# But we're talking about attracting blind users, right? Shells and
# terminals are more natural for us than GUIs. Instructing the computer
# is far more intuitive than pretending that it's a two-dimensional
# surface with pictures on it.
Yes and no. First and foremost, I per
Tony Baechler here.
First, regarding SBL, yes, the .de email would be correct. Here is a generic
command to figure out which binaries a Debian (.deb) package installs:
dpkg -L sbl | grep bin
Regarding boot messages, I usually don't want to hear them either. I silence
Speakup as soon as it st
Tony Baechler here. Kyle, Kyle, Kyle. You're still missing the point. You
seem to think I'm in love with a kernel-based screen reader and my mind is
closed to alternatives. OK, let me try again.
On 4/26/2017 2:52 PM, Linux for blind general discussion wrote:
I myself am completely opposed to a
Tony Baechler here.
You're right. I hadn't thought of that. My ancient DECtalk Express doesn't
do Unicode. Windows screen readers do Unicode. Even Android does Unicode. I
would think there might be a way to borrow from Google. They developed a
screen reader for Android which is based on Linux.
Tony Baechler here. I did this with my DECtalk Express and grub quite a long
time ago. Download this file and put it in /etc/default/ on Debian-based
systems. Run update-grub and reboot. It should come up talking at the boot
prompt before Linux starts.
http://batsupport.com/unsupported/grub
O
Tony Baechler here.
I would say you're not worrying enough. The sighted expect to be understood.
They expect the blind to be able to read what they're saying. I know I've
missed things because they aren't read. I can usually figure out from the
person and context what they mean, but not always
Yes, Unicode would allow access to math content, I think, not sure
exactly what MathML renders as, but still, I want Linux to at
least look good when I start advertising it. I /know/ we can do
what Apple has done with the Mac, and better. On the surface,
the Mac look
Tony Baechler here.
No, I'm talking about attracting as many new users as possible, blind or
sighted with a focus on teens and young adults. I'm being very generalized
here, but if a blind teen gets really interested in what Linux can do but
sees the glaring limitations, they might be willing
Hi,
On Do, Apr 27, 2017 at 12:16:36 +, Linux for blind general discussion wrote:
>Thank you for additional information on SBl and the link.
Your wellcome :-).
>I have no idea how old the version of SBL I'm using is, but as far as
>I'm concerned, it has yet to show it's age, and if I had a bu
@Tony: Maybe I've just been lucky, but in my experience, most sighted
people on the Internet are more than willing to try and explain
graphical content to me if I ask nicely. Granted, I also avoid places
like Twitter, Facebook, and Tumblr like the plague and have done so
since before I went blind a
Luke Yelavich here, reply inline.
On Fri, Apr 28, 2017 at 11:18:22PM AEST, Linux for blind general discussion
wrote:
> BTW.: During this discussion many things have been said about commercial
> and specialized distros, but IMHO things like systemd or pulseaudio are
> much more problematic for p
Tony Baechler here.
On 4/28/2017 6:42 AM, Linux for blind general discussion wrote:
@Tony: Maybe I've just been lucky, but in my experience, most sighted
people on the Internet are more than willing to try and explain
graphical content to me if I ask nicely. Granted, I also avoid places
like Twi
Mostly Facebook, Whatsapp, the Audiogames forum, and teamtalk
occasional, on and Skype too.
--
Sent from Discordia using Gnus for Emacs.
Email: r.d.t.pra...@gmail.com
Long days and pleasant nights!
Linux for blind general discussion writes:
> Tony Baechler here.
>
> On 4/28/2017 6:42 AM
I'm not as old fashioned as some, but I'll take a forum dedicated to a
specific subject over the mega social sites anyday, and I'll leave
promotion on the megasocial sites as an exercise for those who enjoy
that environment.
Outside of these blind-specific lists, I haven't run into very many
blind
Luke Yelavich here, reply inline.
On Wed, Apr 26, 2017 at 09:04:56PM AEST, Linux for blind general discussion
wrote:
> Am I correct in saying that while in theory it could be done, isn't it
> impractical? Taking a standard initramfs on a standard Debian-based system,
> how would you know what sou
To be fair, unless Tumblr has seriously changed since I last used it
before migrating to WordPress, it is totally accessible if used
correctly. It is a blogging platform, similar in many ways to WordPress
or even Blogger by Google, it's just a different underlying back-end
system handling thing
Tony Baechler here.
On 4/29/2017 3:26 PM, Linux for blind general discussion wrote:
Having thought about this though, it may be worth putting together a special
build of speech-dispatcher that is usable in an initramfs. I may end up doing
this anyway just for kicks.
If you do, I would be inter
Luke Yelavich here, reply is inline.
On Sun, Apr 30, 2017 at 09:23:20PM AEST, Linux for blind general discussion
wrote:
> If you do, I would be interested in testing it. I thought of another problem
> though. What about unmuting the sound? I'm using the snd_emu10k1 module.
> Without poking at ami
Mark Peveto here.
Luke,
In Vinux 5.1 the best way to get console logins to speak is to indeed add your
user to the audio group. The next time you reboot and start speechd-up, switch
to a console, it'll read you your login prompt. Ok, so it isn't the most
preferred way, but it does indeed wo
Hello, this is Samuel,
Tony, on mer. 26 avril 2017 03:26:56 -0700, wrote:
> As I understand it, it isn't the fault of Speakup that it took so long to
> get to staging and is still there. The kernel developers were absolutely
> opposed to including it and wouldn't help at all.
That's not exactly r
Hello, this is Samuel,
Eric Oyen, on mar. 18 avril 2017 08:23:34 -0700, wrote:
> here is one thing that might be distro independent: create an
> accessibility package set.
As mentioned by others in the thread, doing it as a distribution of
binaries will lead to a lot of problems. Having it as a
Hello, this is Samuel again, last time for today, sorry I'm answering
all of this at once, I was in vacation last week while you were all
discussing furiously :)
Eric Oyen, on mar. 18 avril 2017 08:23:34 -0700, wrote:
> This would include the [...] config files needed to make any distro
> accessi
Christian here, reply inline,
On Sat, 29 Apr 2017 08:07:59 +1000, Linux for blind general discussion wrote:
> Luke Yelavich here, reply inline.
>
> On Fri, Apr 28, 2017 at 11:18:22PM AEST, Linux for blind general
> discussion wrote:
>> BTW.: During this discussion many things have been said abou
Hi,
Of course you are right saying that we have to recognize that the oriented devs
work is helpful and better than a so hard contribution to mainstream.
However this approach, where we build an alternative image of a distro with
some specific settings has a risk, we saw with Sonar and, in a le
I would be interested in your offer. I would need a decent build environment
for kernel images with the Speakup patches. My existing server is eventually
going away. I would need decent hardware with enough memory. I don't think
it would be hard to automate the kernel building process. I would a
Hi, Jean-Philippe MENGUAL here.
Wouldn't we need a location to provide professionals in all blind institutes,
all Facebook groups, etc, for knowing that next to Windows and Mac, they have:
- Vinux, to install a native accessible system on an existing computers
- other projects you think relevant
It's not true that Red Hat did what they could do as quickly as they
could do it. The spam problem went on for months before some of us
finally started to make an issue of it. Even then it tooke a couple of
weeks before anything was done. Secondly, they should have removed the
spammer from the
Email me off list at j...@iavit.org. Our server is more of a meeting
place than a development environment. We can save you the cost of
hosting and a domain name. We can give you space to host your downloads,
the email list, plus a blog or a wiki for documentation.
On 04/24/2017 05:34 AM, Li
I wouldn't mind moving to a new list.
--
Sent from Discordia using Gnus for Emacs.
Email: r.d.t.pra...@gmail.com
Long days and pleasant nights!
Linux for blind general discussion writes:
> It's not true that Red Hat did what they could do as quickly as they
> could do it. The spam problem went
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