Re: [orca-list] Desktop environment note

[John G Heim <jheim math wisc edu>]

About Mate accessibility... I was messing around with a VirtualBox 
virtual machine at work last week and somehow, the volume on my desktop 
kept getting set to zero. But I knew that there is a sequence of 
keystrokes to get to the volume control. So I just kept setting the 
volume back until I got the virtual machine working. BTW, the sequence 
of keystrokes is alt+F1, s, enter, s, enter Then you can press the left 
and right arrows to adjust the volume.

As I write, it occurs to me that while I think it's pretty cool how easy 
it is to adjust the volume in Mate, it probably could be even easier. A 
good accessibility feature might be to make something like alt+F7 
decrease volume and alt+F8 increase volume.

In fact, maybe there's some way I don't even know of.


On 8/8/21 1:52 PM, Jason White via orca-list wrote:
> I discovered this weekend what I should have known all along: it's 
> possible to install multiple desktop environments alongside each other 
> in a single Linux installation. Gdm (and probably other display managers 
> also) allows you to choose what type of session to invoke when you are 
> logging in.
>
> Thus, I installed MATE Desktop 1.24.1 and KDE Plasma 5.22 together with 
> the already installed GNOME 40.
>
> MATE desktop inherits much, if not all of the accessibility of GNOME 2, 
> on which it is based. I might be mistaken, but it seems to me that MATE 
> is more accessible than GNOME 2 was; and accessibility is stated as a 
> development objective on the MATE Web site. Although I found some 
> issues, most of what I tried to do worked and was accessible with Orca, 
> as the MATE users on this list would be well aware.
>
> KDE Plasma was partly accessible. For example, I could navigate and 
> interact with the menus, but I couldn't find keyboard commands to 
> navigate among items on the desktop. The KDE terminal application, 
> Konsole, wasn't very accessible - in particular, the terminal widget 
> (obviously the most important component) was just identified as 
> "terminal" in flat review, and I couldn't read any of the contents.
>
> The basics of starting Orca within the desktop session worked as 
> documented, at least. They're making progress - very slowly, admittedly, 
> and with a long way to go, but progress it nevertheless is.
>
> I think GNOME 3.x (and hence GNOME 40 and its successors) needs 
> substantial work to bring its screen reader accessibility up to 
> reasonable standards. GNOME Foundation has been funding important 
> development effort concerning GTK 4 accessibility recently, but that 
> hasn't yet extended to going back and fixing the accessibility bugs in 
> the GNOME code that the project maintains. They may work on it as they 
> shift to GTK 4 - at least, that would be a good opportunity to improve 
> the completeness and the quality of the implementation. They've also 
> documented the GTK 4 accessibility API in a developers' guide - an 
> important step in the right direction.
>
> Of course, others may have different opinions. I didn't perform a 
> systematic review of the software discussed above.
>
> As always, thanks are owed to all those in the community who are working 
> on various aspects of Linux accessibility (with unreasonably limited 
> resources to devote to the task). The development expertise in the 
> community of contributors to accessibility in the Linux environment is 
> excellent.
>
>
> _______________________________________________
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> Orca wiki: https://wiki.gnome.org/Projects/Orca
> Orca documentation: https://help.gnome.org/users/orca/stable/
> GNOME Universal Access guide: 
> https://help.gnome.org/users/gnome-help/stable/a11y.html