Re: [orca-list] nvda under the Wine

[Jacob Schmude <j schmude gmail com>]

Hi
Currently, no Windows screen reader will work under wine because of two 
major problems. The first problem, in a nutshell, is that Wine has 
almost none of the internal MSAA or UIA hooks that they need in order to 
work. Also, where the proprietary screen readers are concerned, Wine has 
no facility for hooking up drivers which rules out the display driver 
approach used by most of them. The second issue, though less serious, is 
that Wine does not emulate a full Windows environment (i.e. none of the 
Windows GUI is emulated). Wine will run a single application in a 
partially-emulated Windows environment. So, saying "wine nvda.exe" will 
run wine with nvda, but realize that nvda is considered the application 
which Wine is to run. There's no start menu, no desktop, nor any of that 
so, even if NVDA or another screen reader were to work, you'd have no 
way to launch another application within that environment where the 
screen reader is running.
What would be neat is if Wine could bridge standard MSAA and UIA hooks 
to at-spi somehow. It could probably be done, but it wouldn't be a quick 
or easy thing to do. The end result would be that Windows applications 
in Wine would communicate enough to run with Orca, but I'm not sure if 
everything could be emulated correctly since at-spi and MSAA/UIA are 
different in their approaches.
As for Linux being able to do everything that Windows can... I wish. I 
really wish it could, and we're getting there. In fact, for most people 
who don't require accessibility, we're already there. Unfortunately 
however, some apps are either not available or written in QT (i.e. 
Skype) and we either can't use them or can only do so half way. We're 
close, but we're not quite there yet as far as accessibility goes.

On 03/30/2011 07:17 PM, Kyle wrote:
> I'm currently not able to get NVDA speaking using Wine. It complains
> about ALSA, Pulse and a few other things, but it does play the startup
> and shutdown sounds, so ALSA and Pulse don't seem to be the real
> problem. I have the portable version of NVDA in $HOME/nvda. Running
>
> cd nvda
> wine nvda.exe
>
> plays the startup sound followed immediately by the shutdown sound.
> Several errors about alsa, Pulse and a dll called winemp3.acm, which I
> believe is just an mp3 codec, and shouldn't be required to start NVDA
> speech, appear in the terminal, and the program dies. It looks as though
> fixes are needed in Wine somewhere before NVDA can be made to speak.
> ~Kyle
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