Re: [orca-list] Languages, Profiles and Orca Setup

[Alejandro Leiva <aleiva emergya es>]

On 09/08/10 17:51, Paul Hunt wrote:
> Hey all,
>
> On the subject of the Orca roadmap.
>
> I would like the language detection / switching feature to be high on
> the priority list.  I've been talking to people on the Ubuntu
> accessibility IRC channel and this subject has come up.
>
> One person wanted to know why, having selected a different language to
> English on the Ubuntu live CD boot screen, Orca still came up speaking
> in English.  Another (sighted) user did a headless install and blogged
> about the experience.  He commented that he assumed that if he had
> selected a different language at the start of the boot process then he
> would get an accessible install in that language... wrong...
>
> I would like to suggest that we have an ability to detect the desired
> language based on the gnome locale setting and use an appropriate voice
> if available.
>
> I know we have bugs 400717 - detect languages and bug 419742 - Ability
> to manually switch languages, but I just wanted to flag the issue again.
>
> I also think an option to automatically switch languages on the fly wen
> reading text marked as being in a particular language in Firefox or Open
> Office would be really neat for all our users / contributors who
> correspond with us in English but have a different native language.
>
> On to my other points...
>
> If language detection is one day implemented (so Orca will by default
> start up in a locale determined language), could we do away with the
> Orca setup routine?
>
> Personally I think it would make much more sense to start up using some
> sensible defaults and then provide something like a quick start wizard
> that could be run at any time (from the Orca main window) to let users
> configure basic settings for speech, braille and magnification if they
> wish to.
>
> I imagine the setup routine confuses a lot of people, particularly
> people who might be wishing to run Orca for test purposes, to have Orca
> suddently firing questions at them left, right and centre.
>
> We could at least make the setup routine optional.  "Welcome to Orca.
> Since this is the first time you have run Orca would you like to run a
> quick start wizard to configure some basic settings?  If not this wizard
> can be run at any time from the Orca main window" etc.
>
> Another idea that came up was maybe Orca could offer to run a tutorial
> similar to the Mac's Voiceover tutorial when it's run for the first time.
>
> If we could detect the language to use, and detect whether or not we're
> on a notebook and if brltty is running we could have Orca start up with
> reasonable settings for the user.
>
> My final idea here is (and I think it's come up before) is to have
> settings profiles.  These would be selectable from the Orca main window
> and there would be a "Configure" button that would bring up the
> Preferences GUI to enable the selected profile to be customised.
>
> The default profiles that spring to mind are; Full Speech, Minimal
> Speech (for the LD users) and Magnifier only.  The user could of course
> create their own profiles that could be switched between either with
> some customisable toggle keys or perhaps automatically if the language
> changes...
>
> Thoughts, comments etc?

Hi Paul,

	I think that we can resolve the "back to my main selected language" 
with a keybinding.

	About the ability to switch languages based in natural language or 
multi-lingual text. Do you know what is the state of the art of this 
technology? I'm trying to figure how performant is natural language 
processing algorithm to automatically detect locale based on natural 
language.

	I think that a tutorial is a good idea. In fact in the current project 
funded by CFR (Consorcio Fernando de los Ríos) [1] the item Lot. 2, 3/b is

	* Self-paced tutorial about OCRFeeder with ORCA. All documentation must 
be produced in accessible formats and supports free distribution licenses.

        We can add to orca this tutorial.

	Finally, about profiles, we (Emergya) are implementing [2] a full orca 
preferences profiles. In this way you can define multiple profiles. 
Then, we can provide specific default profiles for full/minimal speech, 
mag only, etc...

[1]: http://live.gnome.org/Guadalinfo_accesible
[2]: http://git.gnome.org/browse/orca/log/?h=new-settings       

Cheers,
--
Alejandro Leiva