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Re: [orca-list] LXDE/Openbox menu accessibility


I don't remember noticing the version number.  Whichever is the current
version in the Arch repo.

I haven't really given mate enough time to be honest.  I didn't find the
menu very intuitive.  It seems to be in some kind of grid rather than
just a top-down list with sub-menus.

Rill is persisting with it for now and I am giving lxde a hammering.  So
hopefully we can come up with some usable notes for both.

If the sys tray is accessible from the keyboard I may well go back to it.

Fluxbox is on my list to try.  It has just been demoted by Trisquel
though :)



On 25/06/2014 18:21, B. Henry wrote:

What problem did you have with the mate panel? 
Having the panel readable is one of the attractive features and of the lighterweight desktop choices it's 
the only one 
with an accessible panel, systray, whatever you want to call it that I know of.
I mentioned to Rill fluxbox as an option for your PI work. It'll have an even smaller footprint than LXDE, 
but some 
programs that are likely accessible with lxde don't work at the moment with speech on fluxbox.
I'm hoping that some accessibility work will be happening on the fluxbox front sometime pretty soon. There 
appears to be 
interest on the part of one or more devs, but time is in short supply at the moment.
Fluxbox is only configurable with a text editor if one needs speech, for now anyway.
Were you using mate 1.8? 1.6 did not have as good an accessible experience with the panel as does the newer 
mate. Only one 
panel 
will be readable, the last one installed that has something on it, or that's my experience on two distros.
Mate really is the gnome2 experience kept up to date. 
The reason I like XFCE so much isin great part its very easy to configure interface. More settings are 
readily available 
to the user with out learning exact wording and syntax to use something like gsettings editor than any 
desktop I've ever 
tried. Things are not only customizable, but easy to customize. 

--
B.H.
 
On Wed, Jun 25, 2014 at 05:40:00PM +0100, Mike Ray wrote:

I haven't used xfce at all.  I recently tried mate and didn't get on
with the panels.  That made me scrap mate for now and try lxde.

The main reason I tried lxde is that it is the desktop that the
Raspberry Pi foundation has chosen for Raspbian.  That choice is based
on the footprint.  As soon as I have finished the OpenMax integration
layer code that will allow me to modify espeak to avoid the nasty
Broadcom  sound driver that makes espeak stutter and crash the kernel, I
will be able to accessify lxde on a Raspberry Pi.

I recently saw a web page which compared a shed-load of different
desktops for bloatness, and lxde comes out as one of the leanest.

Rill, who some of you will know from Vinux, and I have been trying out
various installs as blind people who are too stubborn to get sighted
help, or just as people who think we should be able to install and get
accessibility via Orca without running to someone with eyes.  We're
making guides to each of these installs and scripts which do the main
stuff where we can.

lxde is nicely accessible, except for I can't find a way to access the
bottom panel and hence the sys tray from the keyboard.  I am going to
try stripping out this panel and installing either stalonetray or trayer
to see if that gives me what I want.

I am using openbox which as a window manager, is superbly configurable
with a text editor.

As far as I can tell both xfce and lxde suffer from a silent task
(alt+tab) switcher.  Although today I did a net install of Debian 7.4,
unaided, and once I had switched from the horrible gnome shell to gnome
fallback, I had an accessible task switcher.

This is the first time I have tried a Debian net install and it went
very smoothly.  I hope gnome fallback doesn't get left out of the repos
any time soon because I hate the general drift towards gnome shell and
unity.  Note that I might have the gnome shell wrong but I think that is
what it was on Debian until I swapped it for gnome fallback.

Mike


On 25/06/2014 17:05, B. Henry wrote:

A general question for anyone, but especially for the person who said that lxde seemedto be a better 
choice  compared with 
xfce... Are there  some accessibility issues that lxde has resolved that are still problematic when using 
xfce?
That's what i  think you are saying in
Start Quote:
your posts just made me try LXDE/Openbox again after more than 1 year
  as it
  seems to be the more appropriate lightweight alternative than XFCE
  (development state...).
Snip
Also, I'm unclear as to whether using alt escape to     cycle through open windows provides  the speech 
that is missing 
when one changes windows with alt tab.
My curiosity is not idle or random. I've been using XFCE more than any other GUI since I installed 
Arch-Linux about six 
months ago. The lack of accessibility when it comes to panels and desktop icons in XFCE has gotten me 
using Mate quite a 
bit. 
Besides having a mostly accessible panel mate's overall performance and its interaction with Orca are 
very good, but I'd 
prefer XFCE if I had spoken access to the systray icons and applets. 
I have only tried lxde as it came configured on the screenreader-enabled versions of Knopix a few years 
ago. There were 
some stability issues when I tried to multitask with graphical applications. 
What if any accessibility advantages does LXDE have over XFCE? Going OT a bit more, is there anything 
else about LXDE that 
is especially attractive? I know its very thrifty when it comes to using memory, but is it more 
responsive than XFCE?
Thanks in advance for your feedback everyone. 
--
B.H.

On Wed, Jun 25, 2014 at 03:47:47PM +0100, Mike Ray wrote:

 
 We're getting a bit off-topic here so I'll be brief.
 
 I have come to something of a grinding halt with lxde at the moment
 because I can't find a way to get the sys tray, which I think is on the
 bottom panel, although I might be wrong as I don't really either
 understand or like panels, to take keyboard focus.  So I can find no way
 of opening the network manager applet.  I could use the nmcli console
 portion of network-manager but it would be nice to have a GUI thingy.
 
 But I have got as far as writing a script to complete the installation
 of Chris's talking Arch (all the bits after arch-chroot), and another
 script which does the lxde install.
 
 Mike
 
 
 On 25/06/2014 14:16, Alex Midence wrote:
  I don't use LXDE so, take this with the proper grain of salt but, couldn't
  you use different virtual desktops to manage how many applications you
  switch between?  Assume you will have 15 applications open at any given
  time.  You can use three virtual desktops and organize them according to
  function i.e. have the internet apps like your browser, e-mail and chat
  sessions open in one virtual desktop, your office productivity stuff like
  Calc, Gedit and writer on another one, your music player, file manager and
  calendar application on the third one and so forth and so on.  Will
  alt+escape restrict itself to your current virtual desktop in LXDE or will
  it switch across them all?
 
  Alex M
 
 
  -----Original Message-----
  From: orca-list [mailto:orca-list-bounces gnome org] On Behalf Of Jakob
  Herrmann
  Sent: Wednesday, June 25, 2014 7:59 AM
  To: orca-list gnome org
  Subject: Re: [orca-list] LXDE/Openbox menu accessibility
 
  Hi,
 
  your posts just made me try LXDE/Openbox again after more than 1 year
  as it
  seems to be the more appropriate lightweight alternative than XFCE
  (development state...). In general, everything works fine on my Arch
  box and
  I am able to access applications and menus. However, I am having still the
  core problem that nothing is spoken or displayed while switching between
  windows with alt+tab (or backwards). I found out that you can also switch
  using alt+esc which is acceptable as workaround for me, but this seems to
  switch more or less randomly and takes more time to find the right tab if
  thousands of things are opened up. How do you deal with this issue?
 
  Cheers,
  Jakob
  _______________________________________________
  orca-list mailing list
  orca-list gnome org
  https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/orca-list
  Visit http://live.gnome.org/Orca for more information on Orca.
  The manual is at
  http://library.gnome.org/users/gnome-access-guide/nightly/ats-2.html
  The FAQ is at http://live.gnome.org/Orca/FrequentlyAskedQuestions
  Log bugs and feature requests at http://bugzilla.gnome.org Find out how to
  help at http://live.gnome.org/Orca/HowCanIHelp
 
  _______________________________________________
  orca-list mailing list
  orca-list gnome org
  https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/orca-list
  Visit http://live.gnome.org/Orca for more information on Orca.
  The manual is at
 http://library.gnome.org/users/gnome-access-guide/nightly/ats-2.html
  The FAQ is at http://live.gnome.org/Orca/FrequentlyAskedQuestions
  Log bugs and feature requests at http://bugzilla.gnome.org
  Find out how to help at http://live.gnome.org/Orca/HowCanIHelp
 
 -- 
 Michael A. Ray
 Analyst/Programmer
 Witley, Surrey, South-east UK
 
 The box said: 'install Windows XP, 7 or better'. So I installed Linux
 
 Interested in accessibility on the Raspberry Pi?
 Visit: http://www.raspberryvi.org/
 
 From where you can join our mailing list for visually-impaired Pi hackers
 
 _______________________________________________
 orca-list mailing list
 orca-list gnome org
 https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/orca-list
 Visit http://live.gnome.org/Orca for more information on Orca.
 The manual is at http://library.gnome.org/users/gnome-access-guide/nightly/ats-2.html
 The FAQ is at http://live.gnome.org/Orca/FrequentlyAskedQuestions
 Log bugs and feature requests at http://bugzilla.gnome.org
 Find out how to help at http://live.gnome.org/Orca/HowCanIHelp


-- 
Michael A. Ray
Analyst/Programmer
Witley, Surrey, South-east UK

The box said: 'install Windows XP, 7 or better'. So I installed Linux

Interested in accessibility on the Raspberry Pi?
Visit: http://www.raspberryvi.org/

From where you can join our mailing list for visually-impaired Pi hackers

_______________________________________________
orca-list mailing list
orca-list gnome org
https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/orca-list
Visit http://live.gnome.org/Orca for more information on Orca.
The manual is at http://library.gnome.org/users/gnome-access-guide/nightly/ats-2.html
The FAQ is at http://live.gnome.org/Orca/FrequentlyAskedQuestions
Log bugs and feature requests at http://bugzilla.gnome.org
Find out how to help at http://live.gnome.org/Orca/HowCanIHelp



-- 
Michael A. Ray
Analyst/Programmer
Witley, Surrey, South-east UK

The box said: 'install Windows XP, 7 or better'. So I installed Linux

Interested in accessibility on the Raspberry Pi?
Visit: http://www.raspberryvi.org/


From where you can join our mailing list for visually-impaired Pi hackers
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