Re: Making Orca the default screen reader?



Al Puzzuoli wrote:
Hi all,

Just wondering what would need to happen in order to get Orca officially added as part of the desktop, and to ultimately have it become the default screen reader for the gnome environment? I understand that gnome 2.14 was just released, and that Orca itself is still in prerelease status, so, this obviously wouldn't be a decision that would be made over night. however, I believe this should be given strong consideration for a number of reasons:

I agree with all this as well, and I think the ubuntu accessibility team is in general agreement on this. I think orca is the future for free desktop screen readers. Not only because it's scriptable, but also because making a new start often gives you a chance improve on things from the previous generation. We will need to keep using gnopernics for its magnifier though until a next-generation xgl-based alternative is developed.

For one thing, we have the opportunity to rethink the UI. The current one works but is not very useable, whether you have a visual impairment or not. We should clearly strive for universal access to the new UI in some way, perhaps using both a command line version and a GUI one. I'd also like to see much better integration with the gnome desktop on this. Perhaps key screen reader settings could be accessed via a panel applet?

I'd be interested to know what is the Orca team's timeline on developing the UI. We in the ubuntu team would be happy to collaborate on the design and implementation of it. Perhaps we can do some pre-design work and then put up a bounty for the implementation, a Summer of Code project perhaps.


 - Henrik

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