Re: [orca-list] Possibly Forking Gnome 2

[Piñeiro <apinheiro igalia com>]

On 09/06/2011 08:28 PM, Thomas Ward wrote:
> 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.

And this is the reason we organized an ATK/AT-SPI2 hackfest:
https://live.gnome.org/Hackfests/ATK2011

Trying to identify things to be improved and plans to do so:
https://live.gnome.org/Hackfests/ATK2011/Agenda

> 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.

The reason of why GNOME accessibility seems to be focused to speech
output is because Orca is the best maintained app of the GNOME
accessibility stack.

And about magnification. GNOME Shell (the main actor that differences
GNOME3 from GNOME2) has a lot of accessibility problems right now. But
it sounds estrange to me that you point magnification, as it is one of
the places where GNOME Shell is more advanced. In fact magnification is
a built-it feature on GNOME Shell, and it is constantly evolving. It is
true that color brightnes and contrast will not be ready for 3.2, but it
is almost finished.

> 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.

Not proposed anything? Really?

https://live.gnome.org/GnomeVoiceControl
http://vedics.sourceforge.net/
http://simon-listens.blogspot.com/

Although I recognize that it is still required a lot of work to do there.

BR

[1] https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=639851

-- 
Alejandro Piñeiro Iglesias