Re: [orca-list] miscellaneous Orca comments

[Jason White <jason jasonjgw net>]

On Tue, Mar 11, 2008 at 10:43:38AM +0100, Hermann wrote:
  
> Why do more and more Linux distributors decide to take Speakup away? I 
> think we should try to convince them, that Speakup is really needed by 
> blind/visually impaired people to work with Linux, since I aggree with 
> you, that Orca perhaps never will achieve Speakup's performance.
> But you can't expect Linux beginners to patch the kernel in order to get 
> Speakup.

That's an issue to raise on the speakup list, I think. I know that Debian had
security concerns with the Speakup patches, but I'm not familiar with the
details and I can't remember who mentioned it. It was on another mailing list.

In any event, Gnome-terminal running under Orca is very fast on my machine.
Admittedly, it has two 2.33ghz dual-core Xeon processors and 4gb of RAM, not
your average desktop system, although that will change over the coming years.
If it weren't for the bugs, one could easily do terminal work entirely in
Gnome-terminal, which also provides cut and paste functionality, though I'm
not sure whether that works accessibly. In short, I can't think of any reason
why it couldn't be made to work much more reliably for those who want to work
in that environment for part or all of the time. As mentioned earlier in this
thread, though, that's a separate issue from ensuring that compelling access
is available at the console level.
> Note: I would be happy with the text console, if it were possible to 
> develop a modern sophisticated web browser and a word processor. I 
> never understood while this doesn't happen, since there's for example a 
> text based spreadsheet.

I write in LaTeX and therefore don't need a word processor. I'm not in the
kind of job that requires me to edit other peoples' word processor files. If I
need to read, for example, an MS-Word document I can just run wvHtml to
convert it to HTML.

As for a Web browser, part of the problem is that there are so many standards
that need to be implemented, and there is only a handful of solid
implementations (Webkit and Mozilla, to mention the free and open ones).
Unfortunately, the layout and rendering functionality is integrated closely
with the HTML processing, the Javascript, the Document Object model and other
important components, as I understand their design, and so it isn't feasible
to substitute, say, an audio interface or a text terminal interface, for
instance.

I also think that working directly with the APIs of the browser, as Orca does,
provides better opportunities for structural navigation and other features
that take advantage of the underlying document structures. Access to
mathematics, SVG graphics, etc., will also be on the agenda after Firefox 3.

If you don't need to use scripted content, then Elinks, Edbrowse, Emacs/W3,
W3m and Lynx 2.8 are all good choices with different strengths and weaknesses
that it wouldn't be appropriate to discuss in this forum.