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

[Alex Midence <alex midence gmail com>]

Hi.

Please see responses in-line:



-----Original Message-----
From: orca-list [mailto:orca-list-bounces gnome org] On Behalf Of Jacob
Schmude
Sent: Friday, June 21, 2013 7:06 AM
To: orca-list gnome org
Subject: [orca-list] State of accessibility in GNOME/Others, from an
absentee
<<snip>>
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)?
No. Your experience is not typical.  Gnome3 is quite accessible these days.
If I ever get the behavior you describe, I open a Gnome Terminal and run
gnome-control-center.  I then go to the universal tab and turn the screen
reader switch off then on again.  Close down gnome-control-center and then
everything should work as expected.  You may wish to install the
gnome-tweek-tool so that you can get an accessible desktop screen for
quickly accessing parts of your file system but all your launchers are going
to be in the dash or the applications panel.  


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).
Cinnamon and Mate are not accessible right now.  So, don't waste your time.
KDE is sort of accessible but full of headaches.  If you don't want
minimalism, stick to Gnome3 and Unity.  In particular, use Ubuntu 12.04 not
13.04 since it has the fully accessible Unity 2d desktop on there.  13.04
has the 3d version of Unity and all the accessible work isn't finished on it
yet.

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.


Try Festival.  I'm sure they have a Swedish and German voice.  It's a bit of
a pain to get configured properly though.  Check the list archive for tips
on there in prior postings. You might also look into Svox Pico but I don't
think they'll have Swedish.  I'm almost sure they'll have German.  Also, you
might try adjusting Espeak to a more pleasing voice variant.  Sometimes, the
treble is a bit much on the default setting so I modify it to a voice with a
bit more bass.  Tweak it just right and you have something not too terribly
different to some of the viavoice variants though a bit less clear.  Also,
if youdon't like the phonetic quality of the German or Swedish for Espeak,
try contacting Jonathan Duddington the developer.  I have heard that he
welcomes anyone who wants to help him improve voices in languages he doesn't
speak.  There's a fellow who frequents this list from time to time who says
he helped out with the Afrikaans variants, for instance.

Hope this helps,
Alex M