Re: [orca-list] Using Orca with Braille only

[Jan and Bertil Smark Nilsson <jbsn tpg com au>]

Hello Sébastien,


On Mon, 21 Jan 2008, Sébastien Hinderer wrote:

> Dear all,
>
> I am interested in using Orca with the help of a Braille terminal only,
> i.e. without having to install anything having to do with speech.
>
> I am using a Debian Unstable.
> I downloaded Orca from its subversion repository.
> The versions of gnome and pyatspi I am currently using are those
> coming with Debian unstable, that is, 2.20.2 and 1.20.1 respectively.
>
> I run X from the shell prompt through the startx program.
> My .xinitrc and .xsession files both contain the only line
> exec gnome-session
>
> X and the gnome session start normally and a sighted person(*) could run
> Orca from there.
> My first surprise was that, according to hat has been described to me,
> it is really necessary to choose among the proposed speech systems, i.e.
> the possibility of using Orca without speech was not offered. It that
> correct ? During the installation we of course activated the support for
> Braille. After the installation, we restarted gnome and ran orca again,
> but its windw remained empty and no braille suport was available.
>
> Finally, as far as I can tell BrlAPI works just fine and the Python
> bindings have been installed successfully.
>
> Is there any other information that could be useful to Orca developers ?
>
> Thansk,
> Sébastien.
>
> (*) To me it would be _very_ importnat to be able to run orca by myself
> and also to have a possibility to have it ran automatically each time
> gnome starts, but in pure text mode, without having to use Gnome menus
> to achieve this result, because as long as orca doesn't work sighted
> help is required, which is not a very good thing IMHO.

Assuming that you have compiled Orca with --prefix=/usr and installed 
brltty without any arguments at all, you should be able to turn on 
braille by running

orca -t

 in a console. Among other things it will ask you if you would like 
braille support. You can then run Orca and turn speech off in 
"preferences".

In order to be on the safe side, you might start with orca-2.20 rather 
than the svn version.

Good luck!

Bertil Smark Nilsson