On Thursday 21 June 2007 20:27, Ian Pascoe wrote: > > In fact here's a challenge for you all to do on those rainy evenings. Get > Orca up and running - it's part of the Gnome desktop from 6.06 onwards - > turn your monitors off, no cheating now, and have a go at doing some of > your normal tasks to see what I mean. The voices are fun to play with as > well if you're running Fiesty. And you may actually find it useful to have > the text to speech engine running as you write as it's a dam site easier to > spot spelling mistakes as you're using two different parts of the brain.
Well, I managed to get gnome-orca up and running on a VM install of Ubuntu - no problems at all, it was all pre-installed, I just had to enable it. Anyway, having played around with it for an hour or so this afternoon, I must admit to finding it very irritating at times! The "robotic" voices I could cope with, but the insistance on reading out the whole of the command or path etc drove me mad! Why on earth does it feel the need to read out that there is a context box containing blah and blah with select dialog boxes foo and bar with foo checked and bar unchecked etc etc. Not having seen the Windows screen readers, perhaps Ian could comment on whether they are less "over informative" ! When I turned of the monitor, I was lost - simple as that! The basics are a great idea for visually impaired people, but how practical they are for day to day use I would have to wonder. One of my friends has great difficulty using a keyboard for any length of time and a speech to text program is something we have considered. He has a dual boot system with XP and Kubuntu and of course, any Windows based software is expensive (he is a student and thus unwaged). I was quite shocked that disabled people are expected to cough up huge sums of money for software to help them to use a computer! £350 for software to help visually impaired people to use a computer is disgraceful! Mark -- ubuntu-uk@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-uk https://wiki.kubuntu.org/UKTeam/
