Re: Orca 0.2.3]

[Rich Burridge <Rich Burridge Sun COM>]

Nice summary Henrik. Thanks.

As I was the person who wrote the first version of the Orca Configuration
GUI, let me tell you more.

Firstly, this was initiated to meet the requirement of having a 
configuration
GUI in order to get Orca (hopefully) included in GNOME 2.16. What we
have now is not the end. It's just the beginning.

I generated the GUI using Glade and it's picked up and displayed by the
orca-setup Python script, if (and only if), you start it with the 
command line
option "-gui". By default, orca-setup still works by asking you a series of
questions written to stdout and reading stdin for the answers (i.e works
in a terminal window or directly at the console without the need for a GUI
environment).

As I said, this is a first version of the GUI. Mike Pedersen will be 
helping make
sure that the GUI is fully accessible to blind people, assuming they 
have there
GUI environment configured correctly. For those who don't, they can
simply continue to use the command line version.

The configuration GUI is also going to be available directly from within
Orca. If you start Orca with the --configure option, then you'll get the 
GUI.
If you type a sequence such as Insert-s or Insert-c (we haven't decided 
yet),
then Orca will dynamically bring up the configuration GUI, and allow you
to change your settings, then immediately use your new ones.

For those of you who like editing text files to set your configuration, you
still can. All these settings are written to a file called 
user-settings.py in
your .orca directory under your home directory. Feel free to go into this
file and adjust them there.

It is early days yet. We will be working closely with the blind community
to make sure that their needs are being met.

We appreciate your helpful thoughtful responses on this matter.


-------- Original Message --------
Subject:        Re: Orca 0.2.3
Date:   Mon, 24 Apr 2006 15:48:00 +0100
From:   Henrik Nilsen Omma <henrik ubuntu com>
Reply-To:       Orca screen reader developers <orca-list gnome org>
To:     gnome-accessibility-list gnome org
CC:     orca-list gnome org
References: 	<1145821267 21144 3 camel localhost> 
<20060423220830 GC1297 rednote net> <444C8600 3090809 brailcom org> 
<20060424125747 GD1297 rednote net> <444CD43A 2020502 earthlink net> 
<20060424141506 GO9143 rednote net>



Janina Sajka wrote:
> Seems to me the browser based configuration tool which Tomas Cerha
> mentioned makes the most sense. Works across allenvironments--even
> remotely, if someone can log in.
>   
I think all the points raised so far speak in favour of having a 
flexible configuration that can support several front-ends with a 
single, unified back-end (and preferable with support for several AT apps).

Imagine this:

1. If you type 'orca-setup' at the command line, you get a text based 
setup util for orca, which will also give also give you easy access to 
configure the speech infrastructure, be it Speech Dispatcher or 
gnome-speech. gok-setup or ktts-setup would work the same way.

2. If you type at-setup you get the top level utility with menu choices 
for the different AT apps at the CLI, where one of the choices is 
'Orca', which then takes you to exactly the same setup util as above. 
Another choice might be 'Keyboard settings' which would take you to the 
keyboard settings in CLI mode.

3. If you are using Orca in Gnome and press Ctrl-Alt-SomeKey you get the 
Orca GUI, which gives you exactly the same settings options as #1, but 
displayed with GTK widgets instead of text. As in #1 the settings for 
the speech output are in sibling config utilities so they are easy to 
access.

4. If you go to System -> Preferences -> Assistive Technology in Gnome 
you get exactly the same choices as in #2, but in GUI form.

5. If you access these settings from within KDE you get the Qt 
front-end, using the very same back-end.

AFAIU the Orca team is now making the config code cleanly separated from 
the GUI, so this approach should be possible. It may sound complicated 
to provide all these different interfaces, but by sharing code between 
projects we also share the work load AND we and up with a more flexible 
and more tidy experience for the user.

I'm currently writing up a design spec for this idea here: 
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Accessibility/Specs/CommonATConfig and I've 
proposed it as a Google Summer of Code project: 
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/GoogleSoC2006

The basic design spec should take shape over the next few weeks so this 
is a good time to float ideas.

- Henrik
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