Re: Lots of accessibility questions

Hi Nolan:

I'm very happy to hear that, after some initial setup problems, your Ubuntu accessibility experience is proving to be a positive one.

Recently I've been looking at Orca. How far along is it?
I'm not the Orca maintainer ;-) but from what I hear, and my experience with Orca so far, I think that it would be worth a look, if you have 'developer leanings'. It seems likely that would be, at the least, a useful accompaniment to gnopernicus. We may want to come up with an easy way to switch back and forth between them in your session. Maybe Will will have info about any missing packages which orca needs, I haven't seen the error you report.

Also, I receive the following error when I try running orca-setup:

nolan thewordnerd:~$ orca-setup
Creating .orca directory.
Traceback (most recent call last):
 File "/usr/local/bin/orca-setup", line 64, in ?
   import orca.speech as speech
 File "/usr/local/stow/orca/lib/python2.4/site-packages/orca/speech.py", line 29, in ?
   from core import ORBit, bonobo
ImportError: Can not load accessibility support

As for vino, Calum is right, it just pushes images around - making it accessible would require adding some sort of accessibility-awareness to it. It may be that other ways of making remote apps accessible would be more practical - for instance doing remote X display from an accessible Gnome session. To do the latter, we just need a way to connect a remote "AT-SPI registry" to a local one. I think only a relatively small amount of code is required, but there are security implications that need to be thought out.

I'm a bit curious about assistive technology startup. I've been
adding gnopernicus as a startup session item, but I've noticed the
screen reader checkbox under the accessibility preferences. Is this
intended to replace adding Gnopernicus as a startup program? I've
tried this, and it seems to work, albeit less reliably (I.e. sometimes
it starts, sometimes it doesn't.) I'll do more debugging if necessary,
but would simply like to ensure that I'm understanding correctly
before continuing.
The 'startup session' approach is actually deprecated, the screenreader checkbox is the preferred mechanism. The Gnome developer community is investigating a new session startup mechanism now, but it won't be available for awhile yet, certainly not in the current version of Gnome.

I believe Peter answered your other questions well, thanks Peter and Calum!

