Re: [orca-list] miscellaneous Orca comments

[David Csercsics <aarg shaw ca>]

> Rich Caloggero writes:
> > Janina Sajka Wrote:
> > > But I am perplexed with the desire to recreate the console/screen
> > > environment under a gui terminal app. What am I missing here? What
> > > advantage does it offer? How and why is it the appropriate tool for a
> > > particular task like vim editing, for example?
> >
> > For those without speakup in their kernel, it allows them to have the best 
> > of both worlds: the GUI for tasks which require it (web browsing, 
> > recording, etc), and a terminal for everything else!
>
>
> Is Speakup too expensive? What? Because I think Orca's a long way from
> equivalent access. In fact, I'm arguing it will never catch up. I'm
> arguing it can't, just from the nature of where it lives in the stack.


Well, the problem is integration. If you need to paste something from
a website that you required javacrapscript or  some other bizarre GUI
weirdness to get at into a terminal window like the one you use to
read your mail then you can't do that from a text console because the
data is in the GUI. That's just one example but there are others. The
point is that sighted people do things from GUI terminals with no loss
in functionality so we should be able to as well. Nevermind that the X
server supports graphics cards much more efficiently than a framebuffer
device for some  video cards and it is possible to get a much larger text
area from a GUI terminal than you can with a console. Oh, and flipping
between console and X all day causes a bit of lag as well because the card
is dropping in and out of graphics mode. And, yes, Speakup is not part
of mainline so there is no guarantee it won't break something else. It
still needs work to properly handle the kernel preempt and things like
this so it is currently negatively affecting the performance of some
systems. Not saying that raw console text access isn't required either
because it is. If  your X bails on you for some reason you'd better be
able to read the screen but the point is that you should be able to use
any part of the system equally  well. Half-baked access is worse than
no access at all usually.