Re: [orca-list] Possibly Forking Gnome 2

[Thomas Ward <thomasward1978 gmail com>]

Hi,

Well, that is the reason I'm bringing this up. I realise that Orca is
likely to keep up with newer desktops like Gnome 3, and I'm concerned
that if I base a desktop on Gnome 2 that there could be a conflict in
maintaining a backwards compatible version of Orca. In such a case
Orca would have to be branched or forked for Gnome 2 access and
another for Gnome 3.x support. This is why I really need to know where
Orca, ATK, At-Spi, and various other accessibility technologies are
headed so I might be able to maintain compatibility if possible.

In addition to Orca there is something else that is worth discussing.
Early on in the Gnome 2 development they developed gnome-speech for
handling speech drivers. Later gnome-speech was replaced by
speech-dispatcher. While I understand the change, especially for Gnome
3, I've found certain gnome-speech drivers work better. Take something
like Cepstral Swift drivers. With gnome-speech Cepstral voices are
fast and responsive. Use the generic Swift support in
speech-dispatcher and speech is slow and choppy. With that in mind
there would be some advantage to continuing gnome-speech development
and support since it is still compatible with Gnome 2.

Cheers!



On 9/5/11, Alex H. <linuxx64 bashsh gmail com> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> Well, hearing that, I say full speed ahead. You're absolutely right -
> while we'd all love devs of desktop environments to just understand
> totally what a11y means, it's just not realistic. Sure, some people
> will go out of their way and fix things up, but that's only for a
> version or two, then they go and break perfectly fine a11y in an
> application. I doubt it's their intention, it's just the way it is.
> Sometimes the best thing to do is take advantage of the open-source
> philosophy and do it yourself, rather than waiting months and months
> and months for a company much larger and bigger than you to do the
> work.
>
> Would I love to see GNOME3 and KDE and other environments be totally
> accessible? Of course, who wouldn't. Question is, are we willing to
> wait until pigs fly for it to happen?
>
> From a compatibility point of view, I don't really know how long Orca
> will support the GNOME2.x desktop. As time goes on and other desktops
> become more usable, Orca will need to change to keep up with the
> latest and greatest. I don't (yet) have any real dev skills, so it be
> even more difficult to keep another desktop's dependencies working
> smoothly with Orca over time. I'm hoping I'll eventually be able to
> dive in and help the team do some coding rather than sit and complain.
> <grin>
>
> Alex