Re: [orca-list] interested in trying orca with various desktops

["B. Henry" <burt1iband gmail com>]

I would first like to thank Kyle for his work as an intermediary, both bringing accessability needs to the 
attention of devs and bringing advances in accessability of gnome alternatives, especially mate to the 
attention of blind-Linux-users; as well as taking over  the maintainer's job for the Talking_Arch project. 

I have been using XFCE for a couple of months on ARch, and know others who either have used or are currently 
using or at least testing XFCE on other distros. 
The level of interest in and or knowledge about accessability among XFCE devs seems a bit behind that in the 
Mate team right now, but I find xfce 4.10 lets me do everything I need and most of what I want quite well, 
even on this underpowered netbook. (1.65GHz atom CPU with 1gig of RAM)
What is not yet accessible is the XFCE panel and its applets. Desktop icons also are not announced by Orca, 
i.e. nothing is spoken when I try to switch focus to a panel or the desktop. The main menu is opened with alt 
f1 by default just as it was on gnome2, and everything reads fine there. Alt f2 opens the run dialog, and 
Orca works as  it does with Unity or gnome. Under some condition(s) that I have yet to determine I sometimes 
get accessive processor usage from speech-dispatcher that    does not go away, or at least not in anything 
close to an acceptable amount of time. I've also had similar with firefox or firefox and orca, but  closing 
firefox usually fixed this. It has almost never happened using the firefox 23 that I'm using now, did happen 
pretty often with firefox 26, and I've not tried firefox27. I don't know if these behaviors are ever actually 
Orca bugs, or if they are  exclusively caused by speech-dispatcher and firefox. 
To get xfce to talk you first add
export SAL_USE_VCLPLUGIN="gtk"
GTK_MODULES=gail:atk-bridge
to your ~/.xinitrc file below where you name the desktop you are using, i.e. uncommentt the line for xfce4 in 
the case of xfce.
Or, I think most people just use
export GTK_MODULES=gail:atk-bridge
One can make a gtk accessability file somewhere in /etc to do this as well, 
/etc/profile.d/gtk-accessibility.sh
for arch, would have to look at Debian to see if there or somewhere else.
Besides the packages mentioned in other message(s) in this conversation you will likely need or at least want 
qt-at-spi and what ever it pulls in. For skype for example you need some 32bit qt stuff. Also depending on 
distro you may need a development version of pcmanfm. Caja I guess is now working if you get the source as 
mentioned in another post, but I'm a big pcmanfm, especially on slower machines where nautilus is a real time 
waster much of the time. XFCE's default filemanager is not fully accessible,,  so pcmanfm's where it's at as 
either a backup to or the preffered filemanager on LXDE where it is default, XFCE, Mate, gnome or Unity. On 
Vinux or Ubuntu precise regular pcmanfm works as long as you use detailed list view, but on Arch stock 
pcmanfm doesn't talk. I'm not sure about newer Ubuntu and the pcmanfm in those repos or Debian testing or 
Sid. 
Anyway, on XFCE most people get some speech with the above mentioned gtk module exported, and then they go in 
to settings menu/accessability and check assistive technology I think it's called. Oh yeah, you'll probably 
need to manually start Orca first time...And then go in to the session and startup submenu and make sure that 
everything you need is indeed checked to launch with the desktop, i.e. orca, at-spi and anything else you 
want. 
For some reason the GTK module export did not get me any speech in the GUI other than the "screenreader 
started" announcement when Orca starts. I had to get sighted help to check the assistive tech box in 
accessability settings to have any sp;eech, and from then on all was well for the basics. 
A few other things to look out for: 
This may be specific to my machine, but some keyboard shortcut issues used to be common with xfce it seems. 
Sometimes the main menu doesn't open first try with alt f1. Using the menukey will work, and usually, almost 
always, alt f1 works after that; at least for the rest of that GUI session.
There's another shortcut that opens the menu, may be a tad different visually, but with orca is the same, 
think it's control escape, or control alt escape. (I've changed and added quite a few shortcuts. 
If you will be using startx alone, you will probably need to kill speech-dispatcher processes if you ever 
kill the gui and keep working  in the CLI. Logout scripts will probably handle this for you with any desktop 
manager like gdm lxdm, etc. 
In XFCE on Arch I needed to change several conf   and ini files so that programs would display in such a way 
that orca would read them on launch, i.e. set things to launch maximized, or at least not minimized. There 
were a few other options, mostly bulian  values, 0/1 true/false, yes/no, that I had to change in these 
configuration files, but they were mostly pretty easy to figure out from reading the files and what ever 
comments they had.
I've not gotten the Skype GUI to work with Orca like it does with an older Orca in Unity on Vinux4.0 and some 
Ubuntu releases, (maybe all newer ones).

Keyboard shortcuts are easy enough to create and change, and generally things are quite stable and 
responsive; and of course less of your computer's resources are used as compared with gnome3.x and Unity. 

One last thing I've found is that some programs that may work very well occasionaly stop speaking their main 
screen. Sometimes hitting escape once or twice is all that is required, but other times I must reload or 
rewrite, e.g. in gedit saving the file may do nothing to regain my ability to read the document I'm working 
on, so I have to close and restart the program. Hitting escape is all that has ever been needed in pcmanfm. 

HTH,
--
B.Henry
     















 


On Tue, Mar 11, 2014 at 11:16:51PM +0100, Jimmy Sjölund wrote:
> On Tue, Mar 11, 2014 at 7:23 PM, Don Raikes <DON RAIKES oracle com> wrote:
>
> > Hi,
> >
> >
> >
> > I am trying to find a comfortable replacement for gnome for my
> > debian-based LIveCD.  I am wantignto use one of the lighter-weight desktops
> > like xfce, lxde or possibly even mate.
> >
> >
> >
> > Are there any special configuration settings or things I have to do to get
> > orca to work under these desktop environments?
>
> For the next release of Ubuntu Studio, which run Xfce, we included the
> following packages:
>
> gnome-orca
> espeak
> speech-dispatcher
> brltty
>
> I checked with Xubuntu and it includes the same packages. That said I have
> not been able to test extensively.
>
> /Jimmy

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