Re: Orca new user with a few questions

[Henrik Nilsen Omma <henrik ubuntu com>]

Jason Fayre wrote:
> Hello everyone,
> I have just installed Ubuntu Edgy Knott 1 on a system and I have Orca 
> working with speech and braille.  So far, it seems to work fairly well. 
>   I have a couple questions though.
>   

Cool! Thanks for testing the edgy edge :)

> 1.  Is anyone working on a Cepstral Swift driver for gnome-speech?
> 2.  Can I use an external synthesizer with Orca, such as a Dectalk Express?
>   

Others will be able to answer these better than I can, but it might help 
you to know that we will also provide a version of Orca with an 
experimental Speech Dispatcher back-end, which will be able to support 
more synths. This will be in a separate repository though (compiled and 
hosted by Luke)

> 3.  Is the version of Open Office that is included in Edgy sufficient 
>   

Both Luke and I have tested OpenOffice with Orca on Edgy and find it to 
be quite good. I wonder how much of that is down to improvements in 
OpenOffice and how much is down to the Orca OOo script.

I sat down with our OpenOffice maintainer a few days ago and went 
through OOo+Orca usage so he is quite familiar with it now. From what we 
could judge it basically works, but we would appreciate more detailed 
usability testing. I'm sure he'll be happy to take your bug reports :)

If you get a snapshot you should probably get one built with GTK widgets.

> 4.  Is there a version of Firefox and evolution that I can get that will 
> work better with Orca?

I believe there are some special Firefox builds floating around (but the 
major improvements will appear in v3). As for Evolution, I would suggest 
you file bugs where it does not work as it should so we can try to 
improve the default version.

- Henrik