Re: [orca-list] Orca Enhancement work

[hackingKK <hackingkk gmail com>]

Hi Lina.
Good workd indeed.  This is a great news for all of us.
See my comments inline with your reply.
On Wednesday 02 June 2010 11:44 AM, leena chourey wrote:
> Dear all,
>
> Thank you for your quick responses - it is nice to receive all of 
> these. We had started on this work a couple of months back and before 
> starting, as is our usual practice, we had informed in all the lists 
> about starting on this work -  this was primarily so that our efforts 
> do not get duplicated. At that time, though this thread had sufficient 
> interest, no one had got into actual implementation. Hence we started 
> it. Not sure how anyone has missed on this and started work on this 
> thread?

Yes, I remember reading your queries.

You were also told that the problem is with evince.
I don't know about other lists but orca liest will always be quick in 
response.

> We initially had a lot of analysis/research work to be done to 
> understand what was the quickest and efficient solution to employ to 
> get pdf documents accessible - of all the solutions thus explored we 
> finalised on one to get it implemented. Since this was a research 
> exploration and we were not aware of the feasibility we planned to 
> share it only once we had a working prototype - which is with us 
> today. there is some small fine-tuning left after which we will share 
> the entire work, with source, with all.
IMHO, sharing ideas early on itself would reveal the feasibility.  So if 
you share any of your findings or understandings early in the free and 
open source world, things become much easy for you to assess how 
feasible is the thing you are thinking about.


> We would also love to have feedback and comments on the same - it 
> surely helps the development process. Also, we completely go by the 
> open source philosophy.
Till now we were not aware of how you actually think about solving the 
Problem or your exact approach.

> Our efforts make a pdf document open in firefox. So from Orca when a 
> user opens a pdf document (on a key binding) the document opens, as 
> is, in firefox and Orca reads it from there - with this technique, the 
> document formatting appears to be intact, Orca reads the document 
> properly and this method is not restricted to any one particular pdf 
> reader application. 
Bingo!  There you are.  This is an excelent idea and by all means also 
has the practicality of application newtrality.
But had you told us about this idea before, you would perhaps had people 
like me to help you on this.  The work could have been faster.  And I 
hope you are aware of inaccessible versions of firefox.  Off late we do 
have problems with some versions of ff which were supposed to be accessible.
Here, the release early release often funda comes into play.
Any ways I hope that the code will be released to the community soon and 
will be in the spirrit of free and open source.
The work you are doing is very valuable and is one of the turning points 
in moving visually disabled people to comfortable level in FOSS.
Reading pdf is a critical issue and unless good access is available, 
there will not be complete satisfaction with foss based accessibility.
Congrats for your work.

Happy hacking.
Krishnakant.