[orca-list] State of accessibility in GNOME/Others, from an absentee

[Jacob Schmude <j schmude gmail com>]

Hi all,
Well, it's been a few years since I used Orca and GNOME. I've been happily using Mac OS X for several years, 
but am looking into possible alternatives as Apple (both in hardware and in OS X) is slowly drifting in a 
restrictive direction I don't much care for. I've had all the Windows I can stomach at home (especially that 
usability nightmare called Windows 8) and so I'm testing various Linux/GNOME combinations in virtual machine 
environments. I've got a few observations, then a few quick questions.

** GNOME 3
I've got GNOME 3 (both 3.6 and 3.8) running in a few virtual environments. I have two Ubuntu environments, 
one running 3.6 and one running 3.8 on Ubuntu 13.04. I also have Arch running 3.8. I've got them all working, 
but Orca doesn't read much of anything in any of them. The accessibility switcher (ctrl-alt-tab) reads, as do 
the run dialog and most applications I launch. I've even got the QT bridge running in all these environments. 
However, GNOME itself barely reads at all. The activities overview doesn't say anything when focus changes, 
and with Orca's flat review I just get images and panels, no labels. This really isn't of much use. The 
desktop, if indeed there is one, exhibits the same behavior and the alt-tab list is erratic at best.

** Unity
In contrast, I find Ubuntu's Unity environment to be a bit quirky in the accessibility department, but fairly 
workable. Most things do read at least to some extent and, since I'm no novice to either Orca or GNOME, I can 
get around it quite easily, so that's what I'm testing with for now. To be perfectly honest, I'm surprised at 
just how well Ubuntu works these days.

Questions
1. Are my results typical of the current state of affairs? In other words, is GNOME behaving as it should or 
is there something I've missed (perhaps a setting I need to enable)?
2. Are there any other desktop environments that I can test, i.e. Cinnamon on LinuxMINT, or Mate? Anyone know 
if these work before I go to the trouble of installing them? I've done some playing with XFCE and LXDE and, 
while they sort of work, they're a bit too minimalist for my taste coming from a Windows and Mac background. 
I've got the command-line for minimalism when I need that as I often do (having a full UNIX command-line in 
addition to a nice GUI is one of the things I do love about OS X to begin with).
3. What options are there for decent text to speech? I'd like US English, German, and Swedish (US English 
being primary). Espeak does have them all, but listening to Espeak for any period of time gives me a raging 
headache and its German is sub-par. Looking around I do see Cepstral still offers their Linux voices. 
Apparently Ivona does too, but for some reason they're not willing to sell me a personal license for their 
Linux voices, only for Windows. Not sure what's up with that, or why they'd turn down my money :). I know a 
version of Neospeech for Linux exists, but I can't seem to find any concrete information about that one. 
ViaVoice is out, as it's far too unstable. Are there other tts engines I could look into? Speech is my only 
option, so decent tts is a must.

Thanks for any help :)

Jake