Re: Orca testing...

[Willie Walker <William Walker Sun COM>]

>   Remember you had tried to help me. I was the one using FC3 and you
> had mentioned that you hadn't had any luck with that.

Now I remember!

>   You say orca does pretty good with most gtk aps. Which are some of
> the most accessible ones.

The overall desktop menus work well, and we've had good experience  
with at least:

nautilus
gcalctool
GAIM
GEdit
gnome-terminal
Evolution
...

I'll bring up various other GNOME/GTK+ apps from time to time and  
also find that they work well with Orca.  Our focus right now,  
however, is to get fundamental office productivity applications  
working first.

> I hear gaim is really nice. Will I be able
> to use open office with it, although that is ot a gtk ap...

We're working on OpenOffice right now and we're also collaborating  
with IBM on designing a solution for Firefox.

>   As far as speech goes, how does it sound, and is it enjoyable?

Orca uses gnome-speech for its speech support.  Since gnome-speech is  
merely a framework that sits on top of other speech engines, the  
sound of Orca depends primarily upon which speech engine you use  
rather than Orca itself.  We've done a lot of work with FreeTTS and  
DECtalk, both of which are available across a large variety of  
platforms.

> I'm
> so used to jaws for windows (yes sad to say I'm still using it) but I
> really enjoy it. That is why I asked if there was eloquence for orca
> or linux in general, because I like listening to that voice.

There are also gnome-speech drivers for Festival, Eloquence, and  
IBMTTS (ViaVoice).

> When FC5 is released, I don't see why it wouldn't work, although I
> might try gnopernicus 1.0. I realize that orca is still a project at
> work, but I still want to keep up on it. I was kind of really wishing
> for a jaws for linux type ap, but I'll take what I can get... I'm also
> starting to learn a bit of python so I might contribute to the
> scripting pile, but maybe not for a while.

Our experiences show that we're having much better luck with Ubuntu  
than Fedora.  In addition, you might also try using OpenSolaris at  
some point.  Much of our team is developing on Solaris at the moment,  
and we'll update the Orca QUICKSTART document <http://cvs.gnome.org/ 
viewcvs/*checkout*/orca/QUICKSTART> as things such as GNOME 2.14 are  
available for download on this platform.

Having you develop scripts for applications would be a very valuable  
thing, and I look forward to your participation in this open source  
effort.

Thanks!

Will