Re: Questions about gnome-mag + orca

[Willie Walker <William Walker Sun COM>]

Hi Kristian:

Nice to hear from you!  The "GNOME Outreach Program: Accessibility" task 
for magnification is described here:

http://www.gnome.org/projects/outreach/a11y/tasks/magnification/

> I'm unsure of what the plans forward for gnome-mag is. It has been my
> understanding that it is mostly in maintenance mode?

Right now, that's the case.

> Orca:
>  - Collects data on what's going on. Mouse movement. Window focus.
> Cursor movement, etc.
>  - Controls Gnome-mag (soon to be over DBus?)

Yes.  Ideally, the mouse tracking behavior would be supported directly 
by the magnifier so we don't have to have mouse events streaming all 
over the place.

> Gnome-mag:
> - Just does magnification.

It does more, such as various forms of color filtering.  Thanks to work 
from Rich and Joanie for GNOME 2.22, Orca has a lot more support for 
various useful gnome-mag features.  The Orca WIKI has a write up of the 
various features available today:

  http://live.gnome.org/Orca/ConfigurationGui

> That leaves us with a gnome-mag which, in it's current state, would be
> by and large useless due to performance issues.

Based upon our experiences with real end users at CSUN, it's actually 
quite a usable solution.  Some users commented that it's even better 
than some of the more popular Windows solutions.  The "who is going to 
be the COMPOSITE manager?" and "can we get rid of the Bonobo/CORBA 
dependency?" questions are really the driving factors for making us 
reconsider the current solution.  In addition, thinking about 
magnification as more of a system service and a cross-desktop solution 
(e.g., GNOME and KDE) is important.

At the same time, we want to consider other important things, such as 
the ability to highlight areas of the screen and/or do other important 
transforms to benefit a larger population of users (e.g., users with 
learning disabilities).

So....take a look at the two URLs above.  If you're interested, please 
submit a proposal for the GNOME Outreach task.  My guess is that you're 
probably one of the better people in the world to do it. :-)

Will