Re: Gnopernicus on a Live CD?

[Luke Yelavich <linuxaccess themuso com>]

On Fri, Feb 18, 2005 at 10:12:45AM EST, Peter Korn wrote:
> Hi Luke,
> 
> I played a bit with your Live CD.  Very cool!

Thanks. The initial release was not hard to do. :)

> A few quick comments:
> 
>  1. The default volume level for my laptop was too low; consider setting
>     it higher

I will look into this, but am unsure as to exactly what I can do. Since 
the soundcard is autodetected when the Live CD starts, the volume levels 
have to be set at that time. I know what script I need to modify, but I 
thought they were already set to reasonably high levels. Will put that 
on the TODO list.

>  2. The default Festival speech speech is kinda slow; consider setting it
>     higher (something like rate=188 or some such).

Easily done, thanks. Thought it may have been too slow, but didn't want 
to make it too difficult to be understood.

>  3. gnome-mag isn't present.  It would be nice to be able to do 
>     magnification as well as speech.

Already on my TODO list, thanks for pointing it out though.

>  4. I didn't find brltty on the system.  Is it there?  That is an important
>     addition (even though it boots directly to GNOME, enough people will
>     want console access; also acces to the larger number of Braille devices
>     that BrlTTY provides via BrlAPI).

Again, on my TODO list. I personally don't know very much about BrlTTY, 
and don't have a display to test with, so including it and setting it up 
correctly may be a little more difficult, but I am going to do so.

>  5. More on Braille - can you make /dev/ttyS0-S4 writable by world?  That
>     will make using non-BrlTTY Braille devices a bit easier...

For the moment this is no problem, however in the future I will very 
likely put the user into a group that has access to the serial ports. 
Will put it on my TODO list.

>  6. I didn't see any of the usual Preferences panels.  It would be nice
>     to control StickyKeys (among other things) directly from the menu.

As you may have noticed, the Ubuntu developers have heavily modified the 
GNOME desktop. Now that you have pointed these out, I willl add them. 
Another item on the TODO list.

>  7. It would be nice if at-poke were included.

Good suggestion, and on the TODO list.

>  8. Consider using the Sun Mozilla-1.7 branch instead of (or in addition to)
>     Firefox.  Firefox doesn't have all of the accessibility bug fixes that
>     are in the Sun Mozilla-1.7 branch ((I think only about half have made it
>     back to Mozilla head thus far, with more trickling in regularly...):
>   ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/mozilla/accessibility/sun-mozilla-1.7/

I have certainly been giving this a lot of thought. Firefox is quite 
highly integrated into the desktop, and I am not sure where this 
integration is done, whether it be the firefox package, or a separate 
add-on package. However, as you also suggested, if replacing it is not 
possible, adding the Sun Mozilla accessibility version of the browser 
could also be done.

>  9. The first couple of times I ran Gnopernicus,  it wasn't speaking very
>     much.  I got character echo, window switch events, and group membership
>     when tabbing (e.g. in the gnome-at-preferences dialog, tabbing through 
>     it
>     I'd get "Support"and "Applications" spoken, but not 'checkbox Enable
>     assistive technologies' or the buttons or anything.  It felt like an
>     older Festival bug that I thought was fixed by now, having to do with
>     speech callbacks and the like.  Running Gnopernicus a third time, I
>     didn't experience these problems.  Wierd...

Hmmm. I must try it again myself and see if I get the same behavior. I 
have found that Gnopernicus can act weird whenever it is loaded at the 
same time as the desktop. I will also see what the latest version of 
Festival is, however the version in Ubuntu is quite highly patched. Will 
have a look and see what I can do.

Thinking about it a little more, I also remembered that the version of 
Gnopernicus that Ubuntu are currently shipping is not the latest. I will 
build the latest and include it, and see if that rectifies the problems 
you are experiencing.

if you are interested in what packages are included and their versions, 
check the casper/filesystem.manifest file on the CD.

> Of course, to echo Bill Haneman, including accessible OpenOffice (somehow) 
> would be a key addition.

I certainly agree, but I feel it is something that will take quite a 
while to resolve.

> Again, very cool!

Thanks again for the suggestions. They are very much appreciated.

I am in fact maintaining a wiki page on the Ubuntu wiki with things I 
have completed, and have yet to complete. I intend to add the above 
mentioned suggestions very shortly. You can find the page here:

http://www.ubuntulinux.org/wiki/AccessibleHoaryLiveCDDerivitive

Even though anybody can edit these pages, it is probably not worth 
everybody signing up just to edit this page, so if anybody has 
suggestions, please post them to either these two lists, the ubuntu user 
or development lists, or to me personally, and the wiki page will 
reflect your suggestion.

Thanks everybody for the feedback. I hope that very soon, we can provide 
a fully accessible distribution from top to tail, starting from the 
install, right down to the every-day use. We can help our blind/vision 
impaired peers save a lot of time, and also a lot of cash with free 
software accessibility.

Thanks once again.

Luke