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



I would like to put in a word from a very new user of both Orca and Ubuntu. I'm all for customization, but I also like simplicity. I would like there to be a default scenario that just gets you up and running with some chattiness to tell you how to get to customization pages. The hardest thing to know is what to change and what not to change when you are first starting out and how to get back to restore everything if you make unfortunate choices. I recognize that non-English hearers have a legitimate complaint if Orca doesn't speak their language immediately.
MerrillOn 09/09/2010 04:12 AM, Alejandro Leiva wrote:
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,




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