Re: [orca-list] orca questions

[Michael Whapples <mwhapples aim com>]

On Fri, 2008-05-23 at 00:43 -0400, Alex Hall wrote:
> Hi all,
> Here are the questions I promised in my previous post.
> 1.  I am starting out with Ubuntu 8.04.  Orca keeps randomly not 
> speaking for several minutes.  It comes back, but I can hit 
> alt-f2 and type "orca" to get speech back faster.  Why is this 
> happening, and would going to an earlier version of Ubuntu 
> resolve this?
What probably is happening is that orca is recieving a lot of
information from the accessibility framework and is taking time to
process it. Most of this information is probably not going to be output
as it might be due to a window being altered (eg. controls being added,
etc),so the observed will be orca not responding. If you press alt+f2
and type orca and press enter, it restarts orca, so probably stopping
the processing of all that information and then starting it at a point
where it doesn't need to catch up. Going back to an earlier version
probably won't solve it, in fact it might be worse in earlier versions
as orca has recieved some performance improvements (I know certainly in
firefox). I don't know if it is just my imagination, but I feel orca
runs slightly better on some other distros, although you still will get
some cases where a restart of orca helps it along.
> 2.  I am going to try a bunch of Linux versions tomorrow, most 
> designed for thumb drives, including a few types of Puppy Linux, 
> Breezy, Slax, and DSL, among others (sorry for the spelling, 
> someone told me about them; I did not see the names myself).  Can 
> I put Orca, or some sort of screen reader on any of these?
Potentially yes, but I will give the longer answer as well. The short is
yes as it should be possible to compile everything needed for orca if it
doesn't exist for a distro, but that might be a bit much (particularly
if you are new to Linux). If we are going with do they come with orca or
another screen reader by default, then it is some. I don't know about
the ones you mentioned, but a simple rule about orca is that if it comes
with gnome (I think it is gnome version 2.16 or higher) then orca should
be there, although I have known situations where orca is there but the
distro hasn't included a speech synthesiser. One distro I can garantee
has a screen reader, speech synthesiser, and everything you need to get
going is GRML (www.grml.org). The difference here though is that the
screen reader I am thinking of is speakup, which is a command line based
one and so will mean you are working in a full text console. It might be
possible to get orca working on it as GRML is debian based and I believe
can take debian's packages, but this will need installing (if things
haven't changed from when I read about it).
> 3.  This is not Orca-specific, and let me know if I should take 
> this to another list, but is there a menu-based linux around? 
> They all have GUIs, but I would like one closer to Windows 3.1 
> setup (if I remember it correctly; I was very young when I used 
> it).  Basically, all the applications are in one menu, which 
> replaces the desktop, and each app either launches or brings up 
> its own menu when you hit enter on it or press its letter to 
> launch it.  Could I make something like this with the "build your 
> own linux" project I found? (I know that name is wrong, I cannot 
> remember the actual name off hand).
I am not quite sure what you mean, do you mean absolutely every
application in one single menu rather than the gnome categorised submenu
way? If so, I am not sure. One possibility might be that I think gnome's
menu system can be reorganised by editing a file (I don't know much
about it, but I remember seeing a comment in a slackware gnome project
document saying about if your menus weren't correct then look at certain
files). I can try and find that comment out again for you so as to give
an indication of which files.
> Thank you for any help!
I hope it has been of help.
> Have a great day,
> Alex
Michael Whapples
>