Re: Gnopernicus and Screen Reading Philosophy (Was: Getting 320x200 in X ...)
Kenny Hitt wrote:
Most of the improvements in Gnome 2.6 are bug fixes.
Ah nice to know. I'd have hoped for easier Gnopernicus installation and
proper fullscreen magnification but you cannot have everything. And it is
good you don't have to update to the next OS version to get minor accessory
updates like on the Windows side. The bug about Narrator reading properties
dialogs terrribly wrong in W2k comes to mind.
want your system to boot to a graphical login, make sure the gdm
package is installed. If
I'm not sure if I'd want to do that. It depends on how much I'll be using X.
I think I'll stay mostly character based, as Gnopernicus doesn't work too
well yet. I'm actually thinking of sticking to KDE with magnification for a
while after I've solved my mistery about X not switching to the low-res
modes. After all, I did use WIndows quite happily with magnification, before
having any screen reader at all. Now that I've gotten so used to speech even
in Windows, though, it might be hard having to rely on magnification only,
again.
Yes, testing and Sarge are the same.
Thanks for the breakdown, it clarified things to me a lot.
Most of Gnome is accessible with Gnopernicus, but Mozilla Evolution,
and Gnome's help system still aren't.
That's too bad to hear. Umm how many of the 3rd party apps will work just
fine? I'm a huge WInamp fan, and it would be great to use XMMS with
Gnopernicus. Casual playing goes with mag only just fine, I suppose, but
would be nice to have speech in the config dialogs.
You might try the magnifier of Gnopernicus.
Will consider that. Wasn't too impressed the last time I saw it. They talked
about full-screen magnification on the site but it was but a window that
couldn't magnify under itself, at least on my system.
The big problem with Gnopernicus is it isn't very stable. You can restart
it
a few times before you cause the Gnome session to fail.
Ouch. It keppt crashing my former Mandrake 9.2 system as well but I thought
that's because I might have somehow inccorrectly installed it. I suppose it
wasn't my fault after all.
One of the Gnome developers has started testing an alternitive written
mostly in python. It's advantage is it could maybe do scripting to
work around problems with accessing certain apps.
Very interesting in one way, but pretty much not what I'd want to use
frankly speaking. THis is getting off-topic but:
On the Windows side I've always preferred Supernova to Jaws because of the
philosophical differences about scripting and other automation. I think it
is fine to have app-specific mapping and reading shortcuts, but under no
circumstances should a screen reader do one of the following:
-add new reader-specific keyboard shortcuts and interaction functionality
that's not part of the app being made ----accessible. e.g. next heading in
IE.
-re-format, otherwise beautify or idealize objects on the screen to make
them look or act differently and screen reader specifically. e.g. HTMl
reformatting in Jaws 5.
-modify your Windows/Linux settings by default without asking or telling you
anything e.g. tampering with your keyboard refresh rates when the reader is
running.
-listing info by default that sighted people would have trouble getting at.
e.g. list counts. I think fuzzy info should be preferred in these cases.
For more info, read my free screen reader ideas Web page:
http://www.student.oulu.fi/~vtatila/free_screen_reader.html
One thing that I have not had time to add yet is a point about
cross-platform compatibility recently suggested to me. I don't have any real
plans concerning the architecture yet but it would be absolutely great if
the reader would be as portable as possible. You'd have some kind of an
abstract off-screen model (OSM, perhaps using Swing-like ideas as the basis.
You'd only need to re-implement classes that take care of translating
OS-specific GUI widget to their abstract OSM counterparts to port the reader
to another platform, at least in the ideal case.
I would not want to start yet another religious screen reader war here.
Rather, I'm just pointing out what my screen reader ideals would be.
Supernova on the WIndows side and Gnopernicus in Linux are closest to those
ideals so far.
Gnopernicus, I have to use flat review mode to read the output from an ls
command.
That sounds horrible. Can you run another screen reader, such as Yasr, in a
terminal running in Gnome?
Does a scripting language, such as Python, have much of a performance hit
when it comes to implementing a screen reader? Do you notice any difference
to Gnopernicus in real lief use? Also, why was Python used in stead of Perl?
--
With kind regards Veli-Pekka Tätilä (vtatila@mail.student.oulu.fi)
Accessibility, game music, synthesizers and more:
http://www.student.oulu.fi/~vtatila
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