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Greetings List,
I am revisiting Orca after about a 12 month break
during which time I have been spending time with OSX Leopard and of course
Windows in my day job.
Normally I would have selected Ubuntu for this
task, however the 8.10 installation CD disagrees with the graphics chipset on my
motherboard, so I decided to go with OpenSolaris 2008.11 instead, mainly because
I wanted to tinker with ZFS.
Firstly I have to say I think the OpenSolaris guys
have done a great job of creating a very accessible live CD and installation
system, and I had no problems installing it with out any sighted
assistance.
I was also very impressed with Orca's functionality
with most of the applications pre-installed on the system, including of course
Firefox, Eclipse and OpenOffice.
I have still to decide between Evolution and
Thunderbird for my email, neither of which quite have the perfect accessibility
of Apple Mail with VoiceOver, but I'm sure I'll get there in the
end.
I did want to enquire as to the responsiveness of
Orca however, as it seems a bit sluggish, even though it is running on a core2
duo 3.13 GHZ with 4GB of ram at it's disposal.
I am just running the default Orca that installed
with OpenSolaris, however I do intend to grab the version out of SVN at some
point in the near future.
I am also using espeak as installed with the OS,
although I am considering purchasing a license of Dectalk for
Solaris.
I was wondering if anyone had any optimization tips
however, to make Orca a bit more responsive.
Things of particular note are on the initial screen
when Orca first loads and asks you to select the language, you can't silence
speech and have to wait for it to read the entire list.
Also when I have a bash prompt open and I have a
lot of text scrolling past, it is very hard to silence Orca even after tabbing
away from that window.
In a document when arrowing down, there is a
definite lag between what I'm doing with the keyboard and what is being
spoken.
I recall quite some time ago discussions about
speech dispatcher performing better than Gnome Speech but am not sure if that is
still the case.
I'd be interested to hear anyone's feedback on this
issue, because while I find Orca to be quite functional and feel I could quite
happily use OpenSolaris as my primary OS, I think the laggyness would be enough
to drive me back to something I can more quickly navigate around
in.
Thanks to the Orca development team on doing such
an amazing job and getting Orca where it is today, your efforts are very much
appreciated.
Cheers,
Mitch
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