Re: [orca-list] creating and presenting power point slides with orca

[Peter Rayner <prayner unimelb edu au>]

I'm delighted to say I now have a solution I really like for this.
It's a combination of latex/beamer, the pdfcomment package and  the
pympress package. pympress is available from github at
<https://github.com/Cimbali/pympress.git> or via the standard python
packaging services pip or, I believe conda. pympress has two windows, a
content window and a presenter window. Normally these will be
displayed on separate screens e.g. your laptop and a projector. The
presentation can be controlled from a braille display. Most usefully
one can use the pdfcomment command to add annotations which are
displayed on the presenter screen. Here is an example:
To test copy the text between the dashed lines (not the dashed lines
themselves) into a file such as pympress-demo.pdf
----------------------------------------------------------------------
\documentclass[bigger]{beamer}
\usepackage{pdfcomment}
\begin{document}
\begin{frame}
  this is page 1
  \pdfcomment{and an annotation for page 1\textCR
    which lasts more than one line}
\end{frame}
\begin{frame}
  this is page 2
  \pdfcomment{and another annotation}
\end{frame}
\end{document}
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Compile this with
pdflatex pympress-demo
then pympress pympress-demo.pdf
If you're running two screens my first attempt came up with the wrong
window on each screen, the "s" command fixes this.
I've not tested this yet
with overlays and the like but I have used this in a lecture now and
it worked beautifully. Kudos to Cimbali the author who was happy to
implement accessibility improvements into the master branch so they
will continue to be supported. Make sure you download a fairly recent
version to ensure you have these. There are a couple of more recent
changes that will improve things a bit as well but I think this is
usable as is.
Hope this helps and feel free to suggest improvements either to me or
via the pympress github page.
Peter
ps the \textCR (watch those capitals) command in pdfcomment is what
you need to insert linebreaks.

-- 
Peter Rayner
Acting Director - Climate & Energy College <http://www.climatecollege.unimelb.edu.au>
Clean Air and Urban Landscapes NESP hub <http://www.nespurban.edu.au>
room 371 <http://maps.unimelb.edu.au/parkville/building/200>
School of Earth Sciences, University of Melbourne, 3010, Vic, Australia
tel: work: +61 (0)3 8344 9708; fax: +61 (0)3 8344 7761 
mobile +61 402 752 379, skype: petermorag 
mail-to: prayner unimelb edu au TWITTER: @raynerstrings