Re: [orca-list] Accessible VOIP systems

["Nolan Darilek" <nolan thewordnerd info>]

On 03/12/2009 08:05 AM, Michael Whapples wrote:
> So is there any system I have missed which is worth mentioning? Is 
> there any other accessible clients other than those mentioned? As SIP 
> seems to be the only natively accessible system on Linux may be the 
> orca wiki needs details of using ekiga or linphone.
Don't forget Jingle, the XMPP voice/video extensions. These allow 
communication between any clients supporting the feature, and they're 
what powers gtalk.

Empathy supports this, and is mostly accessible except for one 
(seemingly minor) issue that makes it practically unusable. Items in the 
contact list aren't accessible, though just about everything else I 
tested is. You can arrow through each contact and request info via the 
context menu, thus figuring out which you're on that way, but this is 
painful. There is a bug filed here. I nag on it from time to time, but 
since this would actually be a compelling and accessible VOIP solution 
were this bug fixed, feel free to nag as well. Maybe more naggers will 
get this taken more seriously:

http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=545282

I really hope this gets fixed soon. I've tried fixing it myself, but all 
I've been able to do is change the accessible name of the table as a 
whole, and I fear I'd have to learn a whole bunch more than I have time 
to learn about GTK/glib to make any progress. Chats with the developers 
indicate that they don't understand the accessibility APIs, or that this 
is some unstated bug in GTK. Either way, it's worrying, especially as 
empathy is now an official GNOME module, and this one fix should put it 
squarely in the realm of apps whose accessibility can be improved via 
Orca scripting.

Anyhow </rant>. Empathy is one of those apps I've wanted to use for 
quite some time but can't, next to Banshee.