Re: [orca-list] Possibly Forking Gnome 2

[Thomas Ward <thomasward1978 gmail com>]

Hi Alex,

That's correct. While tackling LibreOffice, Firefox, Gnumeric, etc is
great the real issue is still continuing to develop the low level
accessibility and making sure that it is available to all Gnome, KDE,
and Xfce, applications. While a lot of work has gone in to GAIL, ATK,
and AT-Spi, I still think much could be done in this area to improve
accessibility across the board.

Also as I said in my origenal post right now Gnome accessibility has
been exclusively focussed on speech output via Orca, and to a lesser
degree Gnome magnification. There was some initial work on the Gnome
onscreen keyboard, but this isn't a complete accessibility solution at
all. Here is why.

If a person buys a brand new 64-bit PC running Windows 7 they
automatically get Microsoft's Speech Recognition. This assistive
technology is helpful for people who can't physically type and for
people with Dislexia who have troubles spelling things through no
fault of their own. To date no one has proposed anything like
Microsoft Speech Recognition or Dragon Naturally Speaking for the
Gnome or KDE desktops. This is something I could perhaps research and
develop to improve the desktop accessibility for people besides
blindness.

Another potential area of general accessibility is a plugin for gedit
that allows someone to convert text documents into braille documents.
I've heard roomers of a possible Gnome Braille project, but don't know
if that actually went anywhere. Right now if you want to convert a
braille document you have to convert it via NFB Trans or something
along that lines. However, if we really want to get Gnome into the
class rooms and into the hands of students and teachers a braille
translater could help convert printed materials into braille for far
less than the Windows technologies.

So as I said there is a lot of high level apps or technologies that
could be developed here, but we also need to make sure that Gnome,
KDE, etc is accessible at the core before delving into those other
technologies. Something like figuring out why pressing f2 to change
the file name is broken in Gnome 3 would be a start. Lol!

Cheers!



On 9/6/11, Alex H. <linuxx64 bashsh gmail com> wrote:
> +1. We need foundations and core APIs to be more functional in order
> to expect any sort of global change in FOSS a11y. Fixing up Firefox or
> Libreoffice is great, and we all know that Impress needs work to even
> be usable, but I feel that tackling issues like ATK and atspi2 comes
> first so programs like Libreoffice and Firefox can actually harness
> the new powers of these technologies.
>
> Alex