============== * What is it ? ============== The Linux Screen Reader (LSR) project is an open source effort to develop an extensible assistive technology for the GNOME desktop environment. The goal of the project is to create a reusable development platform for building alternative and supplemental user interfaces in support of people with diverse disabilities.
The primary use of the LSR platform is to give people with visual impairments access to the GNOME desktop and its business applications (e.g. Firefox, OpenOffice, Eclipse) using speech, Braille, and screen magnification. The extensions packaged with the LSR core are intended to meet this end. However, LSR's rich support for extensions can be used for a variety of other purposes such as supporting novel input and output devices, improving accessibility for users with other disabilities, enabling multi-modal access to the GNOME desktop, and so forth. ================== * What's changed ? ================== A demonstration of LSR 0.3.0 will be presented at the GNOME Accessibility Summit. A screencast of the demo will be posted on the LSR homepage shortly thereafter. The demo will showcase the latest screen reading features of LSR as well as two prototype interfaces for people with cognitive decline and reading disabilities. For users * The new settings dialog allows for configuration of settings defined by a particular device or script as well as the current user profile. For instance, a user can change their speech synthesizer without restarting LSR. * Settings are now persistent across sessions. More settings will be added in future versions. * New keyboard commands are now available such as reading accessible descriptions, reporting text attributes, routing focus and caret, etc. See the list of defined commands at * The LSR review keys now function on web pages in Firefox 3.0. The FirefoxPerk will grow new commands for rich document navigation in future releases. * The Perk chooser dialog allows users to manually load and unload scripts for the current application. This allows users to dynamically load/unload tool scripts at runtime, kind of like Emacs modes. * DECtalk is now supported through gnome-speech. * SpeechDispatcher is now supported. * A script to better support accessible login has been added. Instructions for configuring Fedora Core to start LSR at login are now available in the LSR FAQ. (http://live.gnome.org/LSR/FrequentlyAskedQuestions) For developers * The developer scripting API has grown a tremendous number of new convenience methods. See the epydoc on the LSR homepage for details. * Three developer monitors now exist in LSR for watching raw accessibility events from at-spi, execution of LSR scripts, and I/O streams to devices. * User configurable settings may now be defined by LSR scripts. The settings dialog automatically generates an accessible user interface for changing their values. * Developers can now add new dialogs and debugging monitors to LSR just as they can add scripts and input/output devices. They're all just extensions to LSR. * The command line interface for managing extensions is now simpler. * Extensions may now be added by the root user and made available system-wide, or added by an unprivileged user and available for his/her use only. * The spec is updated to support the building of relocatable RPMs. Translations * en_GB(David Lodge) * vi(Clytie Siddall) * zh_CN(Funda Wang) * pt_BR(Raphael Higino) * sv(Daniel Nylander) For full details, please see the ChangeLog at http://cvs.gnome.org/viewcvs/lsr/ChangeLog?rev=1.29. For an idea of where LSR is headed next, visit http://live.gnome.org/LSR/Timeline ====================== * Where can I get it ? ====================== Source code release and contributed packages: http://live.gnome.org/LSR#downloads For more information, visit the LSR home page: http://live.gnome.org/LSR -- Ubuntu-accessibility mailing list Ubuntu-accessibility@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-accessibility
