[orca-list] Vibuntu 1.2 is ready!

["Anthony Sales" <tony sales rncb ac uk>]

I am happy to announce that Vibuntu 1.2 is ready. It will be available for
download from around 17:00 tomorrow afternoon (Friday 12th Dec, 2008) and I
will post a more detailed release announcement tomorrow. With help from Luke
I have now solved the problem of Orca not working with admin apps opened from
the panel menus and enabled Braille support from boot. I feel this is a
significant release because I have now achieved all of my short term goals
for Vibuntu: Speech, magnification and Braille support available at boot with
speech access to admin apps opened from the administration menu. I have
limited the orca support for admin apps to the menu entries, users who do not
need speech support should use the desktop icons to launch them. This will
probably be the last release of 2008 as the next release will be rebuilt from
scratch. I will be posting detailed instructions on how to recreate these
modifications and a wish list of future improvements etc. I would still
welcome feedback and suggestions positive or negative and would like to thank
everyone for all their support, encouragement, and hate mail! ;)

drbongo


-----Original Message-----
From: ubuntu-accessibility-bounces lists ubuntu com on behalf of Peter Fork
Sent: Thu 11/12/2008 03:50
To: Michael Whapples
Cc: ubuntu-accessibility lists ubuntu com;
gnome-accessibility-list gnome org; orca-list gnome org
Subject: Re: [orca-list] Vibuntu
 
Hi
Since people like to bounce emails all over the place I've subscribed to the
orca list as well so my mails won't get caught in the spam filter. If I have
missed an email list I appologize in advance. On the other hand I would
rather keep the discussion to one list to keep the amount of mails sane and
the debate centralized. Therefore I think gnome-accessibility list is better
than the orca list for the debate since it is more generall in nature than
specific to Orca.

Replies follows to all letters in the debate.

As I read all replies I got "much appriciation for that:-)" I don't see that
we're having very diffrent views from each other. Rather diffrent views from
the same side of the fence if you follow my metaphor.

I agree that Sun and all involved are doing a great job we're all in debt to
all of these people wether they are payed to do it or not.

Anthony's work is a good start and surely something that lowers the bar for
people to test out linux.

I might have wished he organized it with the community first so maybe double
work could have been avoided or bonds of cooperation could have been formed
earlier.

But no reason to cry over spilled milk right and actions speak louder than
words so I can only cheer for Vibuntu and hope it only improves over time.

My questioning was made in the goodest of intents to get a creative
discussion started of best practices pros and cons of diffrent
implementations and so on. Iam glad so many has an opinion and that you have
made me think about what I said reevaluate that and sharpen the arguments and
thoughts on the subject.

About logging in automatically I can accept it as long as it is used on the
live cd and not after proper install.

About what accessibility aids should be activated I just suggested that a
user centric view much like in usability design where you lett the user
decide what to use and how, would be more preferable. If not in an kiosk
system like a live cd defenetly in a normaly installed system. I might even
agree that the guest user acount could be enabled from the start with all
aids when installed onto disk since you might not know which user will be
your computers next guest and since I asume we're talking about a fairly new
machine. Alternative the user could state a disability category and all
relevant aids for that would load if the system provided aids for more than
one category witch Vibuntu doesn't seem to aim for.

A small wizard with some questions could have made it easy to collect
relevant data to configure a setup for the user needed. During this process
all aids should be activated so that you no matter what disability could
complete the wizard. Let me give an example:

1. What kind of disability do you need after setup?
"You can mark several options with the spacebar and arrow keys. Press Enter
when done.
a. Braille
b. Text to speech
c. Speech to text
d. Visual ques
e. Magnification
f. Mousekeys
g. Extra keyboard function (typerate, sticky keys, etc)
h. pictogram

After pressing okey next steps would be to configure the selected options to
the users liking one by one. Maybe those options that is language specific
could be set in advance depending on what language the user has chosen at
install or bootup if live cd is used.

Finaly: Thank you for completing setup of the system your computer is ready
to be used.

This would enable only wanted aids and disable all others plus configured
them. We know that aids take a toll on performance and expecialy in "live"
environments be it from cd,dvd or usb. It also would minimize risk for
conflicts and bugs since less code is running. For a new user with a system
that has frozen or where he isn't familiar and might not understand how to
navigate etc is not very faar from hitting the hard reset button and turning
to windows instead.

End example


Iam not realy sure witch user group Anthony is targeting.
A new user probably will not do this alone.
An early adopter would probably forgive some rough spots
and an experienced user would probably be able to "as many of you pointed
out" fix most of these things himself.

Since visual impairment is a disability that affects all parts of your life
Iam wondering if anyone could just put a vibuntu cd in anyones hand and just
leave them to figure out the rest. Even though the year of the linux desktop
has been many times anounced and improvements in usability certainly has been
made I doubt its enough especialy when having a disability. Therefore I
believe more instructional and guiding content might be needed for new users.

A thought might be to strip out the 10mb of example files if it hasn't been
done already to gain some room. I heard they might increase this in next
release.

Thanks for the straighting me out on the admin tools issue. Guess it is some
twitching nerv in me that go off when I hear userspace programs needing root
access to work. I might have thought the problem was bigger than it was as
well.

okey thats it for now.
Feels good to have straighted those things out.
cu on the list
\Peter


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