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

[Thomas Ward <thomasward1978 gmail com>]

Hi Jacob,


Well, regarding Gnome 3.6 I'd have to say I found my experience the
opposite of yours. I've tried Gnome 3.6 on both Sonar and Ubuntu, and
found it a fairly accessible desktop and end user experience. Perhaps
something isn't turned on or you were simply unfamiliar with the new
Gnome Shell environment, but I generally find Gnome accessible enough
for my day to day needs these days.

As far as Unity goes you didn't mention if you were using Unity 2D or
Unity 3D, and that does make a bit of a difference access wise. I will
say though I am quite happy with the access in Unity 2D running on
Ubuntu 12.4.2 stable, and am using Unity 2D as my default desktop
environment.

As far as other desktops to try or check out there is KDE 4.8 and KDE
5.0. Its not as accessible as Gnome or Unity yet, but with some
tweaking you can actually use KDE with Orca if you are up to doing
some testing for the KDE accessibility developers.

As far as Cinnomon and Mate I'd say for get it. Although, Mate was
based on the old Gnome 2.x desktop environment it seems the developers
haven't kept up with the groundwork laid for the Gnome 2.x
accessibility stack so you aren't really going to be able to run
something like Orca 3.6 or Orca 3.8 on a newly released Mate desktop
unless there is something recent I don't know about.

As far as TTS voices goes by far my favorite are the Cepstral Swift
voices Cepstral David, Callie, and Dianne. While they are sometimes a
bit choppy with Orca  they are probably the most human sounding you
are going to get at this point for Linux. The newly released 6.0
voices seem to be more responsive than the 5.x voices.

Interesting enough I have heard AT&T has a version of their Natural
Voices for Linux, but have never found out where to buy them, and even
if I did someone would have to write a extention for Speech Dispatcher
to use them with Orca.

On 6/21/13, Jacob Schmude <j schmude gmail com> wrote:
> 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
>
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