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Re: [orca-list] ORCA improvements

That's awesome news about evince.  Voxin is maintained by Gilles
Casse.  His email I have as "contact at oralux dot org".  I'm pretty
familiar with the speech-dispatcher interface, but Gilles is more of
an expert.  He's definitely the guy to work with.  The OpenTTS guys
are currently very active in improving and maintaining
speech-dispatcher, so if you need some help with drivers, these are
the guys to talk to.  The list is opentts-dev lists opentts org   I
believe speech-dispatcher will become the standard back-end in gnome
over time.

I'll look at the problem on 64-bit Ubuntu Lucid.  However, over the
next several months I would love to help out in an effort to make
various voices easier to select, install and use.  We've got a guy
working on OpenSAPI to make Microsoft voices available.  I'd love to
have a single accessible application where users could select any of
the free voices, or even buy the non-free voices.  One problem is that
non-free voices all have custom ways to buy and install, and it
depends on your flavor of OS.  Could we work with Gilles, Cepstral,
and the others to have a clearing-house application which talks to
their web sites and helps out with buying, installing, and maintaining
voices?  We could even allow users to preview voices to help determine
which ones they actually would like to buy.  This sort of app is
exactly what's missing in open-source land for the blind.

We've got guys over on the Vinux flavor of Ubuntu (customized for the
blind) who would probably like to help out with such an effort.

Bill

On Sat, May 8, 2010 at 9:44 PM, Alejandro Leiva <aleiva emergya es> wrote:

Hi Bill,

El 08/05/2010, a las 21:50, Bill Cox escribió:


Actually, the most important bugs in Orca tend to get fixed pretty
quick by the Orca guys, but with the loss of Willie as a full-time
Orca guy, there's lots of places in Orca that may need help.  I'm sure
Joanmarie will know.  I don't muck with Orca code much, because the
most important bugs are more often in non-Orca packages, and the Orca
guys have kept their code pretty clean.

If you're able to help edit code throughout the Linux system, I
suspect you will find tons of work that needs doing.  Regardless, I'd
be happy to help as far as non-Orca code goes, like with Voxin
integration, which is more of a speech-dispatcher thing.  Here's a
list of Orca/Linux issues I'm interested in:


I'm very interested in voxin integration, all the info you can provide is helpful for me :)



Bugs
----

Deal with Firefox/Orca problems.  Firefox rewrote the caret navigation
and it has bugs that make
structural navigation with Orca difficult.  The bug report is at
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=546068
We have a patch that fixes this problem, but currently it causes two
Mozilla test cases to fail.

Fix voxin problems on 64-bit Ubuntu Lucid.  We use it with
speech-dispatcher, but the voice is garbled for some reason, only on
64-bit.

Fix usb-creator-gtk.  Currently any Python application that updates
it's widgets with a thread locks up the system if Orca is running.  I
believe this is a bug in atk-spi-registryd, and effects several other
programs as well.

Make icons in icon tray say their names instead of just "icon".  There
is a title property that seems to be read by Braille, but not spoken.

Figure out why Orca is not reading upper case chars in a higher pitch.
There's some problem in the Orca/speech-dispatcher interface.

Improve accessibility of GTK+ TreeViews.  Currently apps using
TreeModelSorted, TreeModelFiltered,
or CellRendererPixbuf are typically not accessible, as these classes
break the accessibility
model.  We have a patch for this we're testing in Vinux, and a bug
filed with GTK+: https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=617629

Fix GTK+ so that we can do first-letter navigation in combo boxes.
This would help sighted users, too, but is especially hard on Orca
users.

Improve thunderbird list views - we should not be loading everything
at once when orca is running.  So, for example, clicking on trash
takes several minutes to respond.



A guy from CIDAT told me about bug #321123 [1], what do you think ?



New Features
------------

Make evince accessible.  We need a PDF solution with Orca.


I know that another company is working in make evince more accessible. AFAIK they will support evince 
through orca, text-to-speech support and improvements in some features. I will talk with them to provide 
information to the mail list.



Add "read to file" capability to Orca, which needs a speech-dispatcher
upgrade to return synthesized speech rather than just play it.

Thanks for helping out!
Bill


Thank you Bill for all this info!

[1]: https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=321123

Best regards,



On Sat, May 8, 2010 at 3:19 PM, Alejandro Leiva <aleiva emergya es> wrote:

Hi to all,

       As I said in gnome-accessibility [1] we (emergya) are working on an interesting project to improve 
ORCA in some ways.

       Our targets for ORCA are:

       * Fix the most important bugs.
       * Saving and loading of user shortcut profiles.
       * Integration with other text-to-speech engines like voxin.

       If anyone is working on any of these features or is interested in give feedback would be nice to 
hear from you.

       For tracking our work with this and generate diff in easy way we did a git clone of orca 
repository on gitorious [2]. Feel free to join.

[1]: http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-accessibility-list/2010-May/msg00043.html
[2]: http://gitorious.org/orca-mirror

Best regards,
--
Alejandro Leiva
Área de Proyectos

Emergya Consultoría
Tfno: +34 954 51 75 77
Fax: +34 954 51 64 73
www.emergya.es



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--
Alejandro Leiva
Área de Proyectos

Emergya Consultoría
Tfno: +34 954 51 75 77
Fax: +34 954 51 64 73
www.emergya.es
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