Re: [orca-list] Possibly Forking Gnome 2

[Alex Midence <alex midence gmail com>]

Hi, Jason,

Those are good technologies you mentioned.  I make use of them myself.
 My only beef with them is that they are far too speech-centric which
is all right if you just need something that provides spoken output in
order to use your pc.  to truly make something accessible, you don't
just make it talk.  You have to worry about magnification, braille
output, voice input, alternative input devices and so forth.  Chrome
Vox and Emacspeak are great if you rely on speech to interact with
your PC.  What though, if you're partially sighted, deaf-blind or
mobility impaired?  I think Thomas has the right idea in aiming at
ATK, at-spi and company.  This way, his work will impact a wide range
of people with many different needs.  I honestly think this is better
than Libre Office or Firefox or any of the other technologies he
mentioned.  The beauty of C and C++ is that you can get deep down into
the guts of things with them.  If you are someone who is experienced
at working with these two programming languages, it makes sense to
target low-level technologies which have the potential for impacting
many different things in many different ways.  Libre Office is just an
office suite.   Firefox is just a browser.  Fine projects but limited
to a particular function.  Since they are so high profile, I'm sure
they'll get plenty of atention.  The lower profile non glamorous stuff
like libatk and at-spi on which so much depends don't seem to attract
as much tlc imho.   to make matters worse, as far as I know, there are
no alternatives to them for us in Linux.

My two cents,
Alex M

On 9/5/11, Jason White <jason jasonjgw net> wrote:
> Thomas Ward <thomasward1978 gmail com> wrote:
>
> > What you suggest like helping out with individual projects such as
> > LibreOffice accessibility, Firefox access, or helping out with KDE 4
> > accessibility does seem like a more realistic goal than maintaining a
> > Gnome 2 fork. Plus by hitching myself to an existing desktop or app I
> > can insure my work actually makes it into the major distributions, and
> > isn't just some optional desktop that may or may not get packaged for
> > distribution x. There are certain apps like LibreOffice and Firefox
> > that will be in someone's package repo no matter what. So I think you
> > convinced me that lending my help elsewhere is the right thing to do.
>
> It is. Now here's what I think needs to happen for the accessibility of X
> desktop environments and applications to improve significantly:
>
> There needs to be a group of people who are familiar with the ATK/AT-SPI
> technology, and whose job it is to work with various projects (desktop
> environments and applications) to maintain and improve their accessibility
> support, and to improve the release processes to avoid regressions.
>
> Without such an effort, I don't think we'll see consistent support over the
> long term.
>
> My own interest is in other approaches to accessibility that don't involve
> significant modifications to the source code of applications. For example,
> Emacspeak works by using the extension language of Emacs (in which much of
> Emacs itself is written) to provide a spoken interface; ChromeVox takes a
> similar approach, with only minor modifications to the browser that can be
> subjected to automated testing. For Web accessibility and Aria, there are
> interesting approaches, for example AxsJax, which modifies the HTML content
> on
> the client side to insert missing Aria attributes - much easier than the
> patch/compile/install process required of desktop applications, and all that
> is needed is some Javascript to improve the accessibility.
>
>
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