Re: [orca-list] Accessible VOIP systems

[Willie Walker <William Walker Sun COM>]

Regarding this and the follow on comments - this is good stuff, IMO. 
Michael - can I put you in charge of keeping a summary and then we can 
work to get it on the Orca WIKI under 
http://live.gnome.org/Orca/AccessibleApps ?
Thanks!

Will


Michael Whapples wrote:
> Hello,
> I'm going to go carefully on this one as I know how a basic question 
> regarding skype went into a rather off topic discusssion, I hope this 
> doesn't.
> Also I hope I used the correct generic term (VOIP) for what I mean, I am 
> talking about any of the computer based telephone type services (eg. 
> skype, teamspeak, SIP, etc). I will continue to use the term VOIP for 
> this, sorry to anyone if this is wrong.
> So what is this message actually about? Which VOIP systems are 
> accessible with orca, and which are the better ones?
> I did a bit of research yesterday and here is some of what I found out 
> (may be some of this wants to find its way to the orca wiki, don't know, 
> I will leave that decission to others should they want to).
> Skype: Not currently accessible because it uses QT for the GUI, may be 
> the work on at-spi dbus will help. Possibly useable (to some extent, not 
> sure on how much) with one of the plugins for a different system 
> (skype4pidgin or bitlbee-skype) although I never got one of these 
> actually working on my system. I did manage to get the Skype4Py python 
> skype API working and could check my details and perform a user search 
> (I didn't test any more), so I suppose at least I know an external 
> application can connect to skype on my system, not sure why the plugins 
> didn't work. May be an alternative interface application could be 
> created using python, I am not sure I would want to spend a huge amount 
> of time on developing that but I would be willing to help out.
> TeamSpeak: Linux client not accessible. Also I think this may not fall 
> in free software as it is in the non-free repository of debian, I don't 
> know fully how restricted it is.
> TeamBlittityBlattity: I am mentioning this purely because it relates to 
> teamspeak. It appears its a opensource client for teamspeak and might be 
> accessible as it uses WX widgets. I can't comment whether it is 
> accessible or how well it works as I couldn't compile it on my system to 
> try it out, it seems quite old so may be that's why I couldn't compile 
> it. Anyway if you want to look at it then look at http://teambb.sf.net
> Mumble: This is an open source system (I believe using its own 
> protocol), but they claim it achieves good sound quality and 
> low-latency. Again this is QT so not currently accessible. I don't know 
> whether any developers plan to make alternative clients for it.
> SIP: Probably the most flexible solution as there are many clients (eg. 
> ekiga, linphone, etc). Both linphone and ekiga seem accessible although 
> I think I noticed some problems with the tabbing inside ekiga. Linphone 
> has both command line versions and a GUI version, both are useable. I 
> don't know how the sound quality compares to others as I don't have 
> enough experience with the various systems, can much better be expected 
> (IE. is it very desireable to get one of the other systems accessible?), 
> may be others can comment.
> 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.
> Any other thoughts which would be on topic?
>
> Michael Whapples
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