Re: [orca-list] The State Of Linux Accessibility

[MENGUAL Jean-Philippe <texou actux eu org>]

Hi,

Le 05/08/2015 08:30, Keith Hinton a écrit :
> I was wondering how the major Linux distributions like Fedora, Open
> Sues, etc are doing with Orca, Speech Dispatcher, and generally over
> all how is Linux these days?

Well, Debian and Ubuntu are fully accessible (vocalized installers, 
accessible desktop, braille, etc).
I guess Fedora is too, as they home gnome devs. I am in dubt about their 
installer though.
Accessible desktops are gnome and MATE. KDE is not yet perfectly, and 
others require some hacks, etc.
gnome3 is modern but I think it's hard to learn for a blind people, even 
if Orca does a lot of efforts 9ith it. MATE, fork of gnome2, is really 
great (easy, light, etc).


> I have avoided Linux for a long while because I have a friend who
> believes  actually, who is utterly convinced that linux accessibility
> is going backwards.

No. It's in progress. The accessibility buses are improving, desktops 
are now good and apps are in progress. And some fulltime dev in 
accessibility is now done by some companies (Hypra, F123, etc) to 
maintain a quite a11y, without future regressions in futu!e stable releases.


> But I don't honestly know for sure if that is so.

There has been experienced regressions with gnome3 in 2012. But now, it 
works again and the 2012 experience shows how we must work with 
communities and efforts to maintain an accessible environment for users. 
So I think this time is behind us.

> So, I naturally question him and would like to know from those of you
> out their who are involved in Linux accessibility generally how do you
> think Linux is?

In my opinion Linux is now friendly and accessible. And it's just a 
beginning. I think it will be improved, really. Our future devs will do 
this (improving Orca, MATE, a11y bus).

> WouldI be able to run something under Gnome these days like Virtual Box?

VBox works in commandline fine. Its GUI is accessible even if there're 
some not readable things, like the VM names. This because Qt isn't yet 
perfectly written to connect to the a11y bus, qt-at-^pi, so sometimes it 
doesn't work. And for VBox, I guess the VM names are not coded properly 
(no label on widget) in Qt.

> How does Linux perform with the latest and greatest CPUs, multi core
> SMP hardware and such from your experiences>?

Very hardware-dependent. Generally it works all right.

> My friend says to me that most of you are using old clunky outdated
> hardware which is why you don't get Speech Dispatcher or Orca
> subsystem crashes, etc.

lol he's fun. A lot of wrong ideas he believes a reality. Linux works 
fine on recent hardware, even if I avoid hardware younger than 6 months. 
Because firmware, some drivers (motherboard, audiocard) may not be 
supported. But otherwise it works.
And especially, the Orca+speech-dispatcher work always, regardless the 
hardware you use. If your hardware is quite old, it's not Orca the 
problem, but all the desktop which requires a lot of resource. For such 
cases, MATE is enough, will 9ork properly.

> But I haven't used Linux in so long that I figure the time is now to
> actually just come out and ask and see what responses I get.
> Obviously, I know that everybody will have their own distribution prefferences.
> But I'm not here to start a war on Ubuntu, vs Fadora, etc.
> I am trying aside from an OS specific fight to figure out what the
> current honest state of Linux accessibility is.

Well I think you should try, e.g. on a liveCD, to have your own idea. If 
you find it's complex, you can request a service in a company to ha(e a 
ready-to-use OS and be trained with it. One thing is sure, noawadays, it 
works fine.


> Is it actually falling back and going backwards and thus dying out?
> I don't know.
> Is it worth grabbing something like the latest oh, I don't know, Open
> Suse, Fadora or similar and giving Orca a spin?
Yes. Even if I consider the Debian work as more advanced for 
accessibility. Moreover, their dev cxcle, on 2-3 yeaq, avoids 
regressions for final user as we ha(e time to test, debug regressions, etc.

> So I was hopeing some of you out their might have a better idea.
> Thanks!
>
> All the best,
> Keith
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--
Jean-Philippe MENGUAL

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