Orca menu placement and setup GUI in Ubuntu

[Henrik Nilsen Omma <henrik ubuntu com>]

Hello!

First of all: Orca is now in Ubuntu main and is tagged for the desktop 
seed (will be installed by default). Yay! (should be in tomorrow's live 
CD build I guess) Also see: http://blog.omma.net/?p=10


Now I/we need to think carefully about how to best integrate it with the 
default desktop. Obviously Orca is primarily a tool for VI users, but it 
may be of some interest and use to others also. When we put it on the 
default desktop we should strive to make it accessible to non-VI users 
as well ;)

There are several reasons for this emphasis: If something is in the 
default install lots more people will become aware of it and play with 
it. Developers may test it with their applications and users who just 
encounter it can recommend it to others who need it. This raises 
awareness and is good all round. We are getting good will and 
contributions from the developer and user communities when we manage to 
integrate the AT stuff in an elegant and non-intrusive way. Also, we are 
striving not just for basic accessibility but also for a good level of 
usability in the AT tools!

So, with that in mind ...

Menu placement:

My proposal to our desktop team will be that we create a sub-menu from 
the System -> Preferences menu titled 'Assistive Technology'. The 
current entry, 'Assistive Technology Preferences', will be moved onto 
the sub-menu (and probably renamed). We will also move the Orca launch 
entry (and onBoard) from 'Applications -> Accessibility' over to this 
location. We might possibly move keyboard modifiers here as well. Fedora 
has a similar sub-menu ATM.

I'd also like to consider an entry for the Orca config GUI, but I'm not 
sure it's the best way to do it. A menu item is probably not the way 
blind users would discover or launch Orca or it's config system, but 
it's a good way for others to find it and it may be a good way to make 
the configuration utility generally more discoverable.


Starting and stopping Orca:

I think this area needs some more clarity. I guess the recommended way 
of starting Orca  is from a terminal, from Alt-F2 or from the 
Applications -> Accessibility menu, all via the 'orca' command.

First: how do you close Orca? I know Orca is configured to never die 
accidentally, which is good, but how do you then close it other than 
killing the watchdog script from a process list? Someone who is just 
having a casual look at it (for a review perhaps ...) would want to be 
able to close it and not have it spring to life again. I guess 
generally, this keep-alive daemon needs a bit more testing to make sure 
it is well-behaved.

This also links in to the question of the configuration GUI: if Orca is 
already running, how do you launch the config GUI (other than 
Insert+Shift)? Launching orca --gui-config does not seem to work. It 
seems reasonable to start Orca first and then launch the config utility 
afterwards, looking for things to tweak (or you might want to start the 
config utility first and then close it, with the option of leaving Orca 
running or stopping everything).

I'm sure it's too late for this, but it might be an idea to have Orca 
and the setup utility be separate processes that can be launched and 
killed independently. This is what we do with onBoard. There are very 
likely good technical reasons for keeping it the way it is though. In 
any case I think it would be helpful to create a more intuitive relation 
between the two.

Perhaps the best option would be to write a small panel applet that 
would appear whenever Orca is started. Clicking on it would produce the 
following option:

* Preferences (graphical)
* Preferences (in terminal)
* Help (link to local help and wiki)
* Quit Orca

That way the settings would be easily discoverable, the status of Orca 
could be indicated by the panel icon (one version for active, one for 
muted, etc.)


Basic information:

Again, some basic information like to to start, stop and configure Orca 
should be available in an intuitive place. The Help entry on a panel 
applet would be good. We can also place more information at 
access.ubuntu.com or in Yelp.

The Orca Preferences window currently has 4 tabs with different 
settings. I would propose adding one more: Key-bindings. This would 
eventually let you set new key-bindings interactively, but for now could 
just contain a list of what they are and how to change them.

OK, enough for now :)

- Henrik