Re: [orca-list] Orca out of the box

[Krishnakant <hackingkk gmail com>]

On Sat, 2009-12-12 at 08:24 +0000, Isaac Porat wrote:
> Hello Arki and all
>  
> As this issue is related to Orca I reply to this thread but as the
> mailing list  is dedicated mainly to Orca will not follow this further
> beyond  this message.
I agree, this is some thing which Ubuntu-accessibility should take up
(and if Vinux people decide to do some thing to make their distro even
better with latest orca).
Orca in itself is not broken and hence not an issue.
 
>  
> Firstly Arki, I am not criticizing yourself or Luke I am sure you both
> are committed to the accessibility cause. 
> Unfortunately, anybody who follows the accessibility scene will be
> aware that accessibility within Ubuntu is only a part time effort and
> resulted now with completely speech broken Karmic distro certainly for
> the typical  user who just want Orca and accessibility  to work rather
> than struggle with configuration files, it does not work reliably for
> most geeks either. 

Yes, infact I believe we will have to wait till 10.04 LTS as far as
Ubuntu or any latest distro for that matter for getting all the broken
things correctly.
I am right now very happy with orca 2.27.3 and ubuntu 9.04.
I understand that there are some major changes going on with both the
speach infrastructure in linux as well as the way we want to use
libraries such as atk or at-spi.
I am pritty sure that after the dbus work is stable, all the problems
will be sorted out.
I thus request all the people who love orca to be a bit patient and use
a stable distro.  Orca team is doing some real hard work, (if you don't
believe me then go check their timelines ).
Let's help them to help us.  Some vary good changes are coming up and
yes right now the accessibility structure in distros  like ubuntu 9.10
is broken.  But at the same time there are distros for example ubuntu
9.04 which work perfectly well and with some updates, such as openoffice
3.1, firefox 3.5 etc, we get top class accessibility.

> Accessibility is not a glamorous field for developers to work in for
> free.  We have seen on this list a number of offers over time as far
> as I am aware very few have gone beyond good intentions; sadly this
> situation is not likely to change.

Yes, but good people are still doing good work.
Thanks Wil, johan etc.

>  
> Orca made huge steps forward in recent times but this progress is held
> now in this case by poor audio and speech infrastructure downstream. 

Exactly my point.

> Canonical made fantastic job in making Linux for the first time
> accessible to the masses on their desktop by making everything working
> out of the box with minimal configuration and having to understand the
> nuts and bolts of Linux,

This has also made a grat impact on the blind community's education and
employment.

Arki is already working with an organistaion in Karala (India) where
even I worked for setting up a project.

> unfortunately this does not extend to accessibility with Karmic (the
> underlying problems are there since the switch to PulseAudio  over a
> year ago so it is not simply regression) and until Management are
> committed to follow their bold accessibility statement on the web with
> action I am afraid nothing will happen.  
>    I know that there are geeks on this list who can build their system
> from scratch and optimize it to work with Orca and the best that
> accessibility has to offer but this will not bring free accessibility
> to the masses.  

Yes, free software is painless for sighted people now and i see that
distros like ubuntu and fedora are extremly popular not just amongst
geeks but common computer users or casual net surffers etc.
So why should it not be equally painless for disabled?
I know that orca developers are taking a lot of hard work to realise
this vision and it is now upto the accessibility fokes in the respective
distros to see to it that they maintain the proper infrastructure.
happy hacking.
Krishnakant.
>