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

[Steve Holmes <steve holmes88 gmail com>]

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This is excellent advice.  It might introduce some geek factor which
is so often complained about by operating system critics but really,
the better you know your system, inside and out, the easier time you
will have correcting problems if / when they occur.

Problem today is many computer users, no matter blind or sighted, are
getting emerced into a GUI environment strait away and are completely
missing out on the command-line experienced, we former DOS and current
Linux users enjoy.

But when someone should get into using Orca and such, the setup
process needs to be as strait forward as possible.  So far, this has
gone pretty well with gnome-speech integrated.  I'm really wondering
how well this will go when using speech dispatcher as a default.  This
involves installing another separate package and it often has to be
customized before using "out of the box".  I think when Orca comes
closer to using this as a default it will behoove any of use involved
with package building for distros to make this as seemless as
possible.  I for example am involved some with the Arch Linux distro
and maintain the speech dispatcher package for that distro but it is
currently in a "unsupported user development" area and if it is going
to be mainlined into Orca like this, I will need to persue elevating
this to a production status in our distro so a new user can come along
and pick it up along with gnome-extra and Orca.  Anyway, that is an
Arch issue and may not be as big a problem for other distros.  It is
something that needs to be dealt with wither in setup documentation
like our wiki pages or built into distro setup scripts.

On Sun, Dec 13, 2009 at 01:45:22PM +1100, Jason White wrote:
> My advice to new users would still be to learn the console level first, the
> shell, configuration files, etc., which is both highly accessible and very
> reliable. After that, proceed to Orca and gnome.
>
> My impression from reading this list is that people who come to Linux/Unix via
> Orca without the background knowledge in place tend to get themselves into
> difficulties which it would be much easier and less frustrating to overcome if
> they had an appropriate level of understanding in advance of how to use a
> Linux/Unix-like operating system.
>
> I also think the Unix text-based environment, once having understood the
> basics, is wonderfully usable and accessible, and no graphical desktop of the
> conventional type can come anywhere close to supplanting it no matter what
> accessibility features are developed. I prefer to think of X/Gnome
> accessibility as a very important and valuable complement to what we already
> have rather than as a replacement for it.
>
> However, I don't want to enter into any debate with people who may disagree
> with this, especially not on the Orca list, where such a discussion would
> plainly be off-topic.

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