Re: KDE Accessibility - sorry, off topic.

[Bill Haneman <Bill Haneman Sun COM>]

Hi Olaf!

I appreciate that kttsd can have many useful applications.  I differ
with your statement below, however:

> But screen readers do not help partially sighted users, users with learning 
> difficulties, or people who simply love to have system notifications or IRC 
> messages spoken.

Actually in the Windows world all of those are frequent use cases for
screen readers.  In conjunction with magnification or onscreen
highlighting, screen readers can be especially useful for partially
sighted users and users with reading/cognitive difficulties.  The
"partially sighted" use case is the reason why both gnopernicus and orca
have integrated magnification and screen reading into one system.

I would like to discuss the German company's concerns, since I do not
see gnopernicus, orca, or gok as "special purpose".  By their nature and
design they are intended to be used for a wide variety of end-user
needs.

GOK's configuration difficulty is due to an inherent problem with core
pointer grabs and onscreen keyboards.  All modern toolkits, and many
applications, assume that they entirely "own" the pointer when they are
active, and this causes unsolveable conflicts with onscreen keyboards
which are also trying to access the pointer.  Now that the XEvie
extension is widely available, I think there is a solution available
which GOK can be modified to use, but SOK will run into these problems
too unless they adopy a different design strategy.

This is not to say that the existing general-purpose ATs are easy to
configure so as to meet all user needs, and I don't mean to imply that
they can or will solve all problems.  However, I do think that the
existing ATs are designed to handle most situations in theory, and
feedback from people like this "German company" is what we need in order
to improve the ATs, improve their documentation, and simplify their
configuration.

Best regards,

Bill

>  kttsd is being used successfully by all these user groups.
> 
> For example, there is a German company that installs KDE-based computers in 
> schools for people with learning difficulties. They are making extensive use 
> of kttsd and the other KDE accessibility aids. The big GNOME technologies 
> such as GOK, Gnopernicus, Dasher and Orca are far too special-purpose to 
> address their needs. They could use a simple on-screen keyboard that responds 
> to mouse clicks, but it is very difficult to set up GOK in a way that 
> supports this. I hope the new on-screen keyboard (SOK) will be fill this gap.
> 
> Our strategy for KDE accessibiilty therefore contains two parts:
> 1. Help the GNOME accessibility team to extend their assistive technologies 
> for KDE applications
> 2. Write modular accessibility aids that can be combined to help all those 
> users that are not sufficiently addressed by the GNOME technologies, such as 
> most partially sighted users.
> 
> Olaf
> 
> 
> [ Darragh ]
> > Hello,
> >
> > I'm sorry but out of curiosity I have a quick question.
> >
> > >From looking at the KDETTS page shown below it looks like the plan is not
> > > to
> >
> > necessarily have a screen reader for KDE but to try to get indevidual
> > application developers to include support for speech output via the KDETTS
> > sub-system. I may be reading that wrong. If so, could someone enlighten me?
> > It would seem like an absolutely crazy idea to go down that route so I'm
> > sure I'm missing something.
> >
> > In case I'm not, How do the developers of KDETTS think that developers of
> > applications will know what information needs to be spoken in their
> > applications? Consistancy will go out the window!
> >
> > http://accessibility.kde.org/developer/kttsd/
> > Quote from page:
> > It is hoped that more programmers will begin adding speech capabilities to
> > their KDE programs using KTTS. Eventually, when Qt 4 is distributed, it is
> > hoped that Screen Readers will be adapted to use KTTS.
> > End of quote.
> >
> > Second quote:
> > Provide a lightweight and easily usable interface for applications to
> > generate speech output.
> > End of quote.
> >
> > Quote 3:
> > KTTS -- KDE Text-to-Speech -- is a subsystem within the KDE desktop for
> > conversion of text to audible speech. KTTS is currently under development
> > and aims to become the standard subsystem for all KDE applications to
> > provide speech output.
> > End of quote.
> >
> >
> > Darragh �H�igh
> >      Website development, Application and O/S Technical Support
> >      Website:   http://www.digitaldarragh.com
> >      Email:     d digitaldarragh com
> >      Tel:       +353-87-767-0464
> >
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > gnome-accessibility-list mailing list
> > gnome-accessibility-list gnome org
> > http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/gnome-accessibility-list
> 
> -- 
> Olaf Jan Schmidt, KDE Accessibility co-maintainer, open standards 
> accessibility networker, Protestant theology student and webmaster of 
> http://accessibility.kde.org/ and http://www.amen-online.de/
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