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Re: [orca-list] nvda under the Wine

Hello,
Yes what you say Jacob makes a lot of sense. I have to say the bridging from wine to at-spi seems more possible with the current situation of wine but still that would be a very large task and as you say what would the actual results be like (IE. are the two accessibility APIs too different for them really to map well).
As for the question of do we really need windows, unfortunately the answer is probably going to be for some a yes, regardless of Linux accessibility. There are a hand full of very specialist applications which are closed source and the authors are not interested in supporting Linux. However for many people the answer is probably they can do all that is needed (eg. for more than 95% of my computer use I am probably able to complete it all in Linux). 
On -10/01/37 20:59, Jacob Schmude wrote:

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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