Re: accessibilityy HOWTO

[Malcolm Tredinnick <malcolm commsecure com au>]

On Mon, May 05, 2003 at 10:50:11AM -0400, Christopher Moore wrote:
> Hello,
> I'll begin this note with an admission.  On and off over the past few
> months I've been trying to build a gnome environment suitable for testing
> gnopernicus.  Now that a tarball has been rreleased, it's probably the
> right time to resolve the issues which have lead to my failed attempts to
> build the appropriate environment for testing the accessibility code.  
> 
> At present there seem to be three approaches for building a suitable
> environment.  
> 1.  garnome which builds from released tarballs.
> 2.  jhbuild which attempts to build from cvs sources.
> 3.  Use a prebuilt environment for you distribution.

...and 
  4. Building individual modules by hand. 

This last point is relevant because you are seomtimes going to end up
wanting to build something that is not currently in jhbuild and
definitely not in garnome (or you want to build the CVS version, whereas
garnome only works from the last released tarball).

> And even once you've done the above, you still need to install some other
> pieces and probably write a few scripts before you can get any speech
> output.
> 
> >From my perspective what is missing is a HOWTO whcih will give a basic
> understanding of the requirements along with a roadmap for getting people
> up and running.  Without such a document, it is unlikely that more than a
> handful of folks will have successfully rolled the dice.  And, as has been
> pointed out on this list, feedback from a broad community of users is
> necesary to assure a quality product.

Somebody wrote a short document on their experiences getting everything
up and running a few months ago. Check the archives for it. With the
speed development moves on the accessibility front, anything that was
written that long ago will definitely need upgrades, but it will be a
good starting point.

Personally, I am amazed we do not get more queries from people
struggling to get Festival working on Red Hat 8.0, but maybe I was just
cursed when I was assembling that portion of the toolkit.

> To conclude, I would be willing to volunteer to writge such a HOWTO
> provided there is sufficient interest and that such a document doesn't
> already exist.  

Go for it! When you get to the stage of wanting review, it will probably
be a good idea to also post something to gnome-docs-list, since the
people over there are always willing to help with stuff like that (and
it will be a good chance to test things out on an audience with less
accessibility experience than people on this list).

Cheers,
Malcolm

-- 
What if there were no hypothetical questions?