Re: [orca-list] orca on other desktops

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

I'm pretty sure folks will mostly recommend mate, but it is not as light as XfCE according to independent 
tests I've read and my experience as well as 
more or less official documentation although at least one person here seems to get different results. Lxde is 
even lighter, and then you have ultra 
light environments like Fluxbox, and the all time champ, ratpoison.
Mate is the only one that gives you almost complete accessibility out of the box or with very minor  
adjustments to settings.  XFCE I like better for 
what it does, but panels are completely inaccessible, and the desktop is at best hit or mist with the default 
filemanager which is not really very 
usable all around, so I gave up on XFCE for now, and no work is going on re accessiblity there. 
LXDE gave me trouble  when I ran it a few years ago on Knopix, crashing a lot when I had more than one GUI 
window open, byut maybe that was a knopix 
thing, or maybe it's been fixed. ANYway, pcmanfm, LXDE's default and very awesome filemanager is perfectly 
accessible, and the fastest I've used with 
Orca. I think the same thing is still true with LXDE panels as we get with XFCE, nothing for us in other 
words.
Fluxbox is actually a pretty full featured system for sighted folks, but we get no panels, nor can we use the 
fluxbox applications menu or window menus. 
The panel is the only issue really, and I've long since worked my way around not having panels with a 
combination of scripts, utilities and keyboard 
shortcuts. 
I adapted a apps menu script and improved it, so I can send you your apps menu for fluxbox, or for any 
desktop with out an accessible one. Fluxbox rocks 
as the keyboard shortcuts can be very easily edited/very sijple syntax, and take more options than the 
shortcuts GUIs for gnome, XFCE, etc. You can also 
do many other cool things with fluxbox that you can't with other desktops or that is hidden. It's easy to get 
a program to always open in the same place 
maximized, or in any shape and size you want. 
My buddy Storm wrote a script for ratpoison and fluxbox that gives an accessible run dialog which theese are 
lacking. , and I have written a few scripts 
that give me the kind of info I would probably get from panel applets if they were accessible with Orca. To 
be clear the issues are not with orca, they 
are with the desktops.
So, can you guess what I use?
Yes, Fluxbox. I can help you get it together, but all you have to do is start orca  and make sure you have a 
couple gsettings right for accessibility. 
Fluxbox is just a window manager, so you will have to install all your programs, but I've made lists of what 
you need to turn it in to a full featured 
GUI Desktop. I used to use caja for the desktop management itself, i.e. displaying desktop icons, but have 
switched to pcmanfm for this. I only keep 
caja around for a couple things any more none of which is essential.
The speed difference and thriftiness with RAM are impressive on slow to slow average machines, e.g. atom 
using netbooks or your 2009-2010 ventage 
core2duo dual core systems. 
Not sure why you need or want light, but in my case needing to boot quickly and not particualarly caring 
about the heavily indexed search driven systems 
like gnome or Unity makes the path I've chosen a no brainer for me.
Unity and gnome have their points, but unless you have quad cores I can't see wasting CPU cycles on them, but 
this is just me of course. Each option has 
some things to like and some others to complain about or worse, but the shortcomings of fluxbox are so easy 
to get around that it's a good fit here.
There have been systems where I could not get fluxbox to work.  Manjaro with pulse audio gave me a ton of 
sound errors, maybe some speech ones as well, 
not been there for a while, but could not sort it out when I tried. I've used fluxbox on Vinux4 which is 
based on Ubuntu 12.04 with out any pulse audio 
issues, but there were some of the same accessibility issues that effected mate on that Ubuntu/Vinux release; 
probably due to old at-spi and the like. 
Write me off list for help with fluxbox. A lot of the same stuff applies to ratpoison, and even  xfce. My 
main gripe with ratpoison is need to type  two 
keystrokes for all the shortcuts, and with out shortcuts one is wasting time in my book. My apps menu willl 
work fine there if you don't mind going 
through menus for everything, but I find myself using the same 10-15 apps ten times more than everything else 
I've installed, so I have shortcuts for 
them. 
Besides saving on RAM and CPU cycles Fluxbox can stretch your battery a lot if you do a lot of reading or 
listening to music. 
What distro or distros are you using now?

    


-- 
     B.H.
   Registerd Linux User 521886


  Don Raikes wrote:
Thu, Jul 09, 2015 at 12:23:09PM -0700

>    Hi all,
>
>     
>
>    I was wondering how well orca works on other desktop managers like lxde,
>    flexbox, etc?
>
>     
>
>    I am looking for a lighter-weight desktop than gnome, but I need something
>    very accessible out-of-the-box, and I am not sure I have seen any posts
>    anywhere that say how well the other desktops work for accessibility.
>
>     
>
>    Any info would be greatly appreciated.
>
>    Sincerely,
>
>    Donald

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