Re: Proposal to add Orca to GNOME 2.16

[Willie Walker <William Walker Sun COM>]

> The problem I see with Orca in current state for including it in the
> Desktop is the zero-integration with Preferences. I mean, how is an
> user supposed to launch Orca?. 

The current design of the preferences is indeed a bit troublesome in
that it takes the "Highlander" principle, meaning there can be only one
assistive technology of a given type.  It would be nice to refactor the
preferences dialog accordingly.

There are other ways to launch Orca, however, which are quite acceptable
to many users:

1) Don't start gdm.  Use xinit and put gnome-session and orca in your
~/.xinitrc.  This is an option preferred by several blind users that I
know.

2) Add orca to the "Startup Programs" entries for gnome-session.  I've
never been quite sure why this wasn't something that was done for the
current assistive technologies - was it because the "Startup Programs"
dialog requires so many steps to get to it?

But, a refactored preferences approach definitely seems like a good
thing to have as well.

> So I think we need to agree before a sane way to integrate it with
> current AT preferences:
> 
> [X] Screen Reader
>  ( ) Use generic screen reader (gnopernicus)
>  (*) Use per-app customizable screen reader (Orca) [Show supported apps]

This seems reasonable, and I look to the desktop-devel-list to help
flesh out a sane way to do this.  

Keep in mind that the wording here needs to be careful so as not to
imply the requirement that Orca has to have a custom script for every
application.  Orca provides a "one size fits all" default script that
provides reasonable access to most well behaved applications and
graphical toolkits that support the AT-SPI.  This default script is
automatically used in the absence of a per-app script, and most per-app
scripts actually just subclass it so they only need to provide the
app-specific behavior.  As such, scripts are really only needed to
provide super duper compelling access for some apps in addition to
working around accessibility issues in other apps.

> Or maybe just move the choice between gnopernicus/orca configuration
> inside gnopernicus "Voice" Preferences:
> 
> ( ) Use gnopernicus internal speech engine
> ( ) Use external orca speech engine

This suggestion has me very confused since both Gnopernicus and Orca are
screen readers, not speech engines.  BTW, both Gnopernicus and Orca use
gnome-speech to get to their speech engines.

> Also currently orca-setup is a text based configuration tool, we'd
> need to allow the user to select voice/language using an UI.

A configuration GUI is indeed planned.  The thing I've always found
amusing, however, is the seemingly Catch-22 requirement: you require a
screen reader to configure your screen reader.  ;-)

> So IMHO I think we should agree a good way to integrate Orca before
> the final inclusion in the Desktop. I'd love to see Orca in the next
> GNOME release and it this happens it would be great to have too a new
> GnomeGoal about having an Orca script for almost every application in
> the Desktop.

The more people that wrote scripts, the better.  It would not only help
us improve the overall accessibility of the desktop, but the feedback
would help us improve the Orca scripting architecture.  In addition, as
patterns emerge, we could continually add to a set of useful scripting
tools for script authors.  

In addition, if the script writers were the app writers themselves, they
may be so inclined as to try to do two things better:  1) write more
accessible apps, and 2) test their apps for accessibility.  This would
be cool.  :-)

Will