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[orca-list] Banana Progress - was: Re: Various questions about Orca and the linux world

Hello,

I found some ftp links to some Banana Pi images.

I have got 'Bananian' and 'Raspbian for Banana Pi' to work.  The 'Arch
Linux' I downloaded won't boot.  There is something wrong with the
second partition.

The good news is that the sound driver snd-aaci does NOT cause espeak to
stutter when speakup_soft is loaded and espeakup is used to connect
speakup to espeak.

So currently console accessibility is looking better on the Banana than
the Raspberry.

There is a tiny amount of stuff online to support the Banana Pi compared
to the Raspberry Pi but it will no doubt grow.

I have yet to try the 'Lubuntu' image, not to mention Orca.

As the Banana Pi has twice the RAM it might well work rather better.

Mike

On 13/10/2014 19:29, Mike Ray wrote:

Hello,

I have an email group called raspberry-vi freelists org, and a web site
at http://www.raspberryvi.org/

Currently the state of accessibility on the Pi is this:

The Broadcom sound-driver produces very, very bad stuttering on the Pi
and often causes a 'kernel oops'.  This is true for speakup and emacspeak.

I am writing some code to use the OMX Intergration layer, which will
allow the speakup to espeak connector 'espeakup' to render audio
directly on the GPU.  This will, or should, solve both the stuttering
and the kernel oops.

When I have the first bit finished I will also write an Emacspeak server
and a speech-dispatcher module that uses it.

The kernel oops is caused by a mechanism called the 'video core hardware
interface queue' (VCHIQ).  This mechanism queues both audio and video
data back into the Broadcom GPU.

I have today taken delivery of a Banana Pi.  But there the news is
rather worse:

1.  Currently the links to images for download are almost impossible to
find and use, not least because they have been using dropbox public
links to distribute images and dropbox have suspended the account
because of excessive traffic.

2.  The current images have no code to support sound via the
snd-bcm2835, the same driver the Pi uses.  And I think the source of
this driver is closed source.

3.  There is currently no software to make access to the pin-for-pin
identical GPIO bus available.

4.  The online community for the Banana Pi is currently very small and
mostly in Chinese.  So until it matures it is likely to be a non-starter
for non-hacker types.

Mike


On 13/10/2014 11:14, Vincenzo Rubano wrote:

Hi all,

my name is Vincenzo and I am a blind Italian computer science student. Looking for various information 
about linux, I came across this list and I decided to subscribe.

Starting from this year, I’ll need to use linux for various projects at university; however, before 
beginning to test various distros, I’d like to ask you some questions. I am a novice in the linux world. I 
only have experience with Mac OS X (my primary system) and Windows.

1. First off, I was wondering wether anyone managed to get any linux distro with AT features enabled 
working on a single-board computer, like the Raspberry P or the Banana-p. Was the machine usable, or did 
it have too much latency/was it too slow to let you be productive?

2. Searching for information, I came across two distros that claims to be designed with accessibility in 
mind: Vinux and Sonar. Honestly, I noticed that these distros are popular only among blind users and could 
be considered something like a custom product for blind people. Since I don’t like this philosophy, I was 
wondering wether anyone had experience with “mainstream” linux distros and could recommend me what distro 
to start with.

3. Since my classmates and professors at university are going to use Debian, I’d like to know wether 
anyone knows what the most critical accessibility issues in Debian are and if there are some workarounds 
to bypass them. For instance, I read that Debian can be installed by a blind user on his own only if he 
has a USB Braille Display plugged-in during the first boot, so that Debian can enable Brltty and switch 
automatically to the text-based installation. However, I learnt that orca on this distro must be 
downloaded separately after the installation. Is that correct?

4. In some pages on the Vinux website, I read that Orca works better with Speech dispatcher than with 
Gnome speech (which is the default speech engine in Gnome, if I understood correctly). Can you confirm 
that? If so, how hard switch from Gnome Speech to speech dispatcher is?

5. From what I’ve understood, the most critical points to get an accessible GUI in a distro are the login 
manager and the window manager. Do you have any recommendations about which ones to pick/avoid?

6. Last but not least, do you know wether Orca works properly with gnome-terminal? If not, is there any 
alternative to make it accessible for a blind user?

Thank you in advance for your help. Sorry for asking so much questions, but I’d like to make productive 
tests instead of wasting time on something someone else already figured out. I do believe that putting 
together all the information we have it could be even easier to communicate our issues with mainstream 
distro maintainers and, maybe, get their interest in fixing them.

Looking forward to hearing back from you.

Cheers

Vincenzo.
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-- 
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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