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

From: kendell clark <coffeekingms gmail com>
To: Alex Midence <alex midence gmail com>, 'Vincenzo Rubano' <vincenzo rubano studio unibo it>, 'Keith Hinton' <keithint1234 gmail com>
Cc: 'orca-list' <orca-list gnome org>
Subject: Re: [orca-list] The State Of Linux Accessibility
Date: Wed, 05 Aug 2015 17:51:47 -0500

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hi
If this is true, and I believe I've tried both of these products at
one time or another, then this needs to be fixed. Add two more
programs to my ever growing list. I need some help here, people. I
can't manage everything.


Alex Midence wrote:

Audio production is something of a tender spot for me.  I did some
pretty extensive digging a few years ago on the subject and my
findings were frankly disappointing.

Fact:  Historically, one of the vocations at which blind people
have exceled has been music.  Some noteworthy blind musicians the
reader may be acquainted with include Homer, Ah Bing, Francesco Da
Milano, Joaquin Rodrigo, Andrea Bocelli, Ray Charles, Stevie
wonder, Jeff Healey, José Feliciano and, last but certainly not by
a million miles least Monsieur Louis Braille.

Now then, the question was posed by a blind musician from the
eastern U.S. seaboard if there were anything accessible and
comparable to Sound Forge and Audition in Windows on the Linux
platform.  These are professional quality pieces of music software.
I found two of them which most closely matched up in features and
capabilities.  These were Ardour built on GTK and Rosegarden built
on QT.  Be it know that these far outstrip something like Jokosh
and Audacity in what they can do as they target professional
musicians as opposed to people dabbling in the odd sound editing
project or two.  Neither one of these pieces of software were
accessible.  Neither was Lilipond or fluidsynth.  So, at this time,
there is no accessible way for the average blind musical
professional to work with any score editing, mixing or sound studio
type software in so far as I know.  It's a real bummer.  I would
*Love* to be proven wrong on this one so, please be my guest.

Alex M

-----Original Message----- From: kendell clark
[mailto:coffeekingms gmail com] Sent: Wednesday, August 05, 2015
4:58 PM To: Alex Midence; 'Vincenzo Rubano'; 'Keith Hinton' Cc:
'orca-list' Subject: Re: [orca-list] The State Of Linux
Accessibility

hi Impress is an absolutely valid point. I don't know why orca
works with it so poorly, but if I had to guess, I'd say a
combination of poor libreoffice accessibility support and no orca
specific code for it. If no one has filed a bug against impress,
I'll go ahead and do that now. As for being able to do things on
linux you could do on windows, this is valid, up to a point. The
people that usually make statements like this, or at least the
people I deal with who do,  often mean, "I want to do the same
thing on linux that I did on windows, using the same programs and
doing it the exact same way I used to do it on windows". Which
means, for example, when you tell them that there's no mush z in
linux but that there's tintin and a sound pack for alter aeon,
"that's too hard. I want a gui installer that does all of this for
me because that's how windows does it. If I can't have that then
linux sucks and I won't use it." Pdf files is another area where
linux needs improving. This is supposed to improve greatly in gnome
3.18, but I haven't tested it yet. Then again, the only accessible
pdf reader on windows is adobe's own, so while it might work better
there, you are limited in what programs you can use. None of the
open source or alternative pdf readers in windows as far as I know
work with any screen readers. I'd argue that linux is accessible
enough for beginner, intermediate, and advanced work, depending of
course on the kind of work you do. Audio production is one area
where blind people cling to windows. There are people on this list
who know a lot more about this than I do but if windows wins out in
this area then we need to buck up and fix it. For what little audio
work I do, download from youtube, converting and editing files and
audio metadata, linux works absolutely fine and there are gui
options for all. As for the crackling, this is a well known issue.
I understand it has something to do with speech-dispatcher's use of
the pulse audio api. Luke and jeremy ... something, can't remember
his last name, are actively working to fix this, which should be
available in either a new speech-dispatcher 0.8 release or a 0.9
release, I'm not sure yet. But it's definitely known and being
worked on. I'd say this in closing. No matter which platform you
use, linux, windows, ios, android, osx, there are going to be areas
where accessibility is great and those dark corners where it could
be better. It's just the nature of accessibility. Linux wins out in
my opinion mostly due to it's open source model, it's lack of
activation and it's ease of maintenance. I can throw a distro on a
usb drive and boot it on any computer and have a live working
environment. I can either use that as is or install it. I
understand osx can do something similar, I've never used it. I say
linux wins out because it's not limited to a particular brand of
computer by license agreements. My two scents. Thanks Kendell
clark


Alex Midence wrote:

I don't know.  I think comparing how well something can be
accessibly accomplished in Linux to how well that same task can
be done in Windows is a valid exercise as long as you don't make
sweeping statements like "The overall accessibility experience in
Linux sucks compared to Windows."  If you are used to being able
to do X on one platform, it is natural to feel you should be able
to do it on another just as accessibly and with as little extra
effort on your part as you had to expend on the other platform.

With Linux, my main gripe is presentations.  I rely on them every
day at work since I'm a trainer and they are something of a
lifeblood for me.  In Windows, we use PowerPoint which Window
Eyes, in particular, works extremely well with.  Jaws does OK but
Window Eyes is absolutely outstanding with it.  I can't say the
same with Orca and Impress.  If I got hired somewhere and their
company policy was to have all their class presentations in
Impress format, I'd be in deep trouble.  I'd have to argue for
letting me use Beamer which is a part of LaTEx.  I'd still be in
hot water because the output is to PDF's which Evince handles
only rudimentarily in regular documents and very poorly in pdf 
slides.  I'd have to see about having them let me make a very
basic Windows vm so I can use Adobe while that all gets sorted
out.  I understand there's a way to do this sort of thing with
html and javascript but I don't know it yet.  So, it would be
natural for someone like me to wish that presentations were as
easy to do accessibly in Linux as they are in windows where you
don't  have to learn a complex markup language to get the job
done.

Just an example. Alex M

-----Original Message----- From: orca-list 
[mailto:orca-list-bounces gnome org] On Behalf Of kendell clark 
Sent: Wednesday, August 05, 2015 4:22 PM To: Vincenzo Rubano;
Keith Hinton Cc: orca-list Subject: Re: [orca-list] The State Of
Linux Accessibility

hi This is partly valid and partly not. The stuff about unlabeled
 controls in gnome is absolutely spot on. While it's gotten quite
a bit better in the newest gnome, version 3.16, there are still
areas in the control center that aren't labeled well. I've filed
bugs against these parts and we're just waiting for fixes. Mate
is also pretty accessible. You *do* get access to the applets. It
is a bit weird though, and I don't really understand what's
causing orca to not like the panel very much. I'd have to say a
combination of old gnome 2 code in orca that mate uses and old
accessibility code on mate's part. Both can be fixed. We *need*
more users. I'm rather tired of people picking on linux's
accessibility issues as if they were written in stone. Not that
you've done that. The issues can get fixed. It's going to take 
more orca users doing what I and joanie do. File bugs, test
stuff, report what doesn't work. I've not seen much of this here,
though granted not everyone has the luxury of sitting around all
day like I do. Gnome was part of GSOC this year and they had a
couple of people hacking on java atk wrapper specifically to
bring java accessibility up to snuff. Joanie has dropped a couple
of hints that gnome 3.18's accessibility will be much better, so
I believe her, although I haven't been able to find anything on
that. I've used windows, including the latest version from
redmond. To be completely blunt, if this is the best ms can put 
out, we've got it made. The accessibility issues will no doubt
get fixed with windows updates, but if this were my first
impression of windows I'd be saying it's accessibility were going
backwards. Tested with the latest windows 10 RTM build. We just
need to focus on makeing an already great OS even greater. We do
this by filing bugs, testing features. We don't do it by looking
at what windows does or does not do better and constantly
comparing the two. I'm guilty of this myself sometimes, 
particularly when I feel close to burning out. That's my two
scents Thanks Kendell clark

Vincenzo Rubano wrote:

Hi Keith,

I know this message will make some people angry, but I want to
share my point of view on linux accessibility. This came out
rather long, so enjoy a cup of coffee while reading. ;)

First off, when talking about linux accessibility I like to
clarify what I think is an important aspect: fragmentation is a
problem for accessibility. Since every piece of software can be
configured with different options/different library
versions/different parameters and each distribution can make a
lot of decisions on these aspects, it’s hard to say what’s
accessible and what is not. As you can see, there are too many
variables to consider. Too many for my tastes…

This being said, we have to distinguish between command line 
accessibility and GUI accessibility. If we talk about command
line, we’re in a great situation. Just choose a kernel which is
optimally configured for speakup (i.e. the debian kernel
starting from version 3.2 or the Talking Arch one are two
examples that I’ve used). If we talk about GUI, well, that’s
another story…

The only “accessible” desktops out of the box are Gnome and
Mate. Please note the quotes wrapping the “accessible” word,
their meanings will be clearer after the lines below. Gnome
works, but there are some areas of the Gnome-Shell that are
completely inaccessible for Orca. Gnome Control Center has
unlabeled controls scattered here and there with some of them
being not usable at all and Gnome Tweak Tool has the same
issues plus a few focus-related ones. Evolution, the default
mail client included in Gnome, is completely inaccessible (1).
There are other Gnome pieces that are not accessible, but my 
memory does not recall their names. Tested with Gnome 3.14.3
and Orca 3.14.3. Mate is a Gnome 2 fork. It is accessible, if
you mind not having access to most of the applets (i.e. the
applet to control wifi connections) and having unreliable
multiple file selection due to Orca not announcing properly
when an item is selected or not. Add a few other issues here
and there and that’s the Mate situation. Tested with Mate 1.8.*
and Orca 3.14.3.

Libreoffice/openoffice are the only complete office suites for
linux. Saying that they’re accessible is really an abuse of the
word, though. Libreoffice Writer can be used to some degree,
but if you need to have complex formatting, multiple tables
with many rows and columns and form controls embedded in your
document, then be prepared to a lot of accessibility issues.
And remember that you won’t be able to use structural
navigation within LibreOffice documents due to a Libreoffice
bug sitting in their queue for years. Impress, Calc, Base and
Math have even more severe and critical accessibility issues
that make them far from being usable if you’re blind. Tested
with Libreoffice 4.3.* and 4.4.* with Orca 3.14.3. Notice that
LibreOffice seems to run a little bit better under Debian than
under Ubuntu, but don’t ask me the reason why.

The only decent way to browse the Web with orca is using
Firefox. There’s not too much to complain about that, if you
don’t mind having a lot of troubles with complex applications
such as webmails and with websites that often refresh the page
via ajax. Also, make sure to enable the Orca configuration
option to show one control for each line in a web page,
otherwise you’ll have a lot of latency whenever you get to a
line with more than 10 controls (i.e. 10 radio buttons). (2)

Let’s spend some words on the Speech Dispatcher/Alsa/PulseAudio
 thing. Wow, too many parties involved, don’t you think so? 
Anyways, I’ve always had two issues: 1. From the
SpeechDispatcher configuration, enable a module which is not
present in SpeechDispatcher (i.e module for Pico under a Debian
installation). Restart the SpeechDispatcher service and… Voilà,
no speech at all! And no way to recover, unless you can
remotely access your machine or you have a Braille display or
sighted assistance to rely on. Tested with Debian
Wheezy/Jessie. 2. While the computer is of, plug in your 
headsets. Turn on the computer. Unplug the headsets: you would
expect audio to come from your laptop speakers, but you won’t
get audio output at all. Plug in again your headsets and… Audio
is there. Tested under Debian Wheezy/Jessie and Ubuntu-Mate
14.04.

Finally, let me spend some words on development. Accessibility
bugs that can be fixed/worked around in Orca get fixed rather
quickly, but the problem is that those fixes get to end users
too slowly for my tastes. If a bug is in the accessibility
infrastructure (i.e. pyatspi, atspi, atk and others), then
they’ll be sitting there for years. Not to mention bugs within
Gnome itself or third party apps/frameworks (LibreOffice and Qt
just to mention two examples).

(1): Evolution accessibility is improving from what I can read,
but currently it’s tricky to get to the message body after you
open it. There is thunderbird as an alternative, but if you are
like me and use more than 5 different mailboxes with 20+
different folders and thousands of messages, you won't find
Thunderbird a great piece of software to work with in terms of
accessibility.

(2) Recently, there has been some work to improve these aspects
in Orca. We’ll see them in a 3.18 or something like that
release, so be patient if you need some serious accessibility
support within web content.

Vincenzo.

Il giorno 05 ago 2015, alle ore 08:30, Keith Hinton 
<keithint1234 gmail com> ha scritto:

Hi folks, it has been a very long while since I have posted
to the Orca mailing list. In fact, more than a year. I was
writing in to find out from people who know what they are
talking about what the current state of Linux accessibility
is with Orca, etc. 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? 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. But I don't 
honestly know for sure if that is so. 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? WouldI be able to run something under
Gnome these days like Virtual Box? How does Linux perform
with the latest and greatest CPUs, multi core SMP  hardware
and such from your experiences>? 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. 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. 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?

So I was hopeing some of you out their might have a better
idea. Thanks!

All the best, Keith 
_______________________________________________ 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

_______________________________________________ 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

References:
- [orca-list] The State Of Linux Accessibility
  - From: Keith Hinton
- Re: [orca-list] The State Of Linux Accessibility
  - From: Vincenzo Rubano
- Re: [orca-list] The State Of Linux Accessibility
  - From: kendell clark
- Re: [orca-list] The State Of Linux Accessibility
  - From: Alex Midence
- Re: [orca-list] The State Of Linux Accessibility
  - From: kendell clark
- Re: [orca-list] The State Of Linux Accessibility
  - From: Alex Midence

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