Re: Lots of accessibility questions

[Bill Haneman <Bill Haneman Sun COM>]

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!

Bill