Hello, I have not followed all of the thread but from working with both
GNOME-mag and the Compiz Magnification I can give some input here.
First a little background since most of you don't know me and I am more
of a lurker on this list.
I have been a Blindness Technology Trainer for over 10 years and I use
Magnification myself to access the computer. I have used everything
from the Telesensory Hardware Magnifier, MAGic for Dos and Windows,
ZoomText and a few others that were short lived. I hate to say it but
my primary system is MAGic on Windows XP.
Now on to my thoughts on X11 / GNOME magnification.
1. Magnification should have equal priority to speech when it comes to
usability. Right now every time I install ORCA / GNOME-mag on a system,
one very important hotkey is not defined. The key to toggle
magnification on / off without exiting ORCA. There are many others also
not defined. This will lead into another point later.
2. Compiz is in general very smooth moving around the screen when
magnified. It has hotkeys for some of its functions. However the
versions up to the version in Ubuntu 8.10 do not track the keyboard and
most focus changes. This means that I spend a lot of time "playing find
the cursor" as I often type out of the view.
3. GNOME-mag has made major strides in my eyes over the last year. Most
of the time cursor tracking works. It no longer magnifies the magnified
view if you move your mouse into a wrong location. However, on good
hardware it is jerky when it is following the mouse. This can be and
often is very nauseating to people who have problems with motion
sickness. Also on all of my machines (various video cards, and various
versions of GNOME) I have a second mouse pointer, as if the non
magnified mouse is still visible.
4. Text smoothing in both has improved to my eyes at least. This is
important to someone like me who is in front of a machine for over six
hours at a time. Less "brain stress" recognizing fonts and text. The
problem with the current smoothing is that it sometimes makes text
appear to have blurry edges. This is off-putting, especially if the
reason you are using magnification is you have blurry vision.
Now onto my rough ideas of how things could work better.
1. Have some sort of documentation project so that keyboard shortcuts
can be looked up by developers so that some of the overlapping of key
use can be eliminated. Once this moved forward a bit, trainers and end
users could use it as a reference guide.
2. Magnification needs to be done in two layers:
a. The Application layer: This is where I see Orca and GNOME-mag
right now. They are very good at talking to applications and handling
events. In a lot of cases this is the only place you can do
tracking. Communication with applications are key for getting the most
useful data.
b. The Composition Layer: I believe this is the correct name for
where Compiz does it's work. Here is where your actual magnification
should take place. At this level you have access to overlaying the
screen, video acceleration from hardware and other X11 functions. With
better and faster video chips out now, why not offload those movement
and other functions off the main processor as much as possible.
3. Communication between those layers is what I think may be the hard
part. I don't know much about how D-bus works, but since it has become
extremely standard on Linux systems, It is what will be used most
likely. I don't know if it has a real-time priority for handling
traffic but it may need it to keep speech and magnification synced up,
or even quick keyboard actions.
I hope this made sense.
Thanks,
Shawn
Willie Walker wrote:
> Hi Bryen:
>
> I don't believe the problem is a conflict between Orca's keys and
> Compiz's keys. Instead, the the two different problems are that Compiz
> causes events to be delivered in a very strange order when switching
> between windows and that people have not been successful in using the
> keyboard to navigate to the top/bottom panels and the desktop.
>
> Will
>
> On Mar 5, 2009, at 8:27 AM, Bryen wrote:
>
>> On Thu, 2009-03-05 at 07:57 -0500, Willie Walker wrote:
>>> For Orca users, the two main bugs are the Alt+Tab problem that causes
>>> Orca to be somewhat silent
>>> (http://bugs.opencompositing.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1027) and Ctrl+Alt
>>> +Tab
>>> not working
>>> (https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/compiz/+bug/228343). The
>>> issue with Ctrl+Alt+Tab seems to be that Compiz is using it for
>>> something else: http://wiki.compiz-fusion.org/CommonKeyboardShortcuts.
>>>
>>
>> I would definitely agree that Compiz's hotkey combinations get somewhat
>> confusing and there's no ready tool to list all the combinations that
>> are currently active, nor a notification that the combination is already
>> in use elsewhere.
>>
>> Assuming that there is a scenario in which the default Compiz hotkeys
>> aren't going to change because non-a11y users are used to those hotkeys,
>> would we want something where if Orca is detected to be in use, then use
>> a different set of hotkeys than what is set up by default? I would
>> presume that an Orca user has quite a few hotkeys of his/her own set up,
>> and thus a more intuitive relationship between Orca and Compiz is
>> needed.
>> --
>> Bryen Yunashko
>> openSUSE Board Member
>> openSUSE-GNOME Team Member
>> GNOME-A11y Team Member
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> gnome-accessibility-list mailing list
>> gnome-accessibility-list gnome org
>> http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/gnome-accessibility-list
>
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