Re: X Accessibility (Was: Gnopernicus ...)
On Wed, Aug 25, 2004 at 11:24:42PM +0300, Veli-Pekka Tatila wrote:
> Kenny Hitt wrote:
> I'm not sure if I'd say the same. I mean, I've been spoiled by GUIs so to
> speak. Even though Linux is loads more powerful than DOS, I still don't
> feel quite at home sitting in front of a text terminal. At least as a Linux
> newbie it often seems like in Linux I gotta actively think of what I'm
> doing. In a graphical OS, I can think of what I'm going to do next in stead
> of having to think how am I going to do this or this. let's not start a GUI
> vs console war here, though.
>
There really is no point to such a war in Linux. Your feelings are from
getting thrown into something new and clearly very different. Also,
you've already been told you can do a lot of damage to your system by
typing the wrong command. For perspective, what would happen if you
opened "My computer", selected your hd, and press shift delete on your
Windows box? To do
the same in Linux, you would need to be root, change to the / dir and
type "rm -rf *". A normal user trying the same would be told by the
system "you can't do that".
> I just wanted to point out that as I have a little sight left, though I
> still need mag and speech, I find GUis very nice as long as they are
> relatively accessible. I've been quite happy on the Windows side with
> Winamp, NoteTab Pro, 2X Explorer and a variety of other great apps.
I'd like to describe a short session on my system and let you guess
whether I was using a GUI or a console.
I start in a tree view. The children are colapsed, so moving up and
down arrow read the nodes at the current level. I press enter on the
node called "installed packages". Enter expands the sub tree for
"installed packages". I have several choices. I use down arrow to
select the one called "Gnome". I press enter to expand the tree under
"Gnome". I see there is only one child called "main". I down arrow
to "main" and press enter again. I then get a long list of programs. I
forgot to mention there is a window at the bottom of the screen with a
short description of the object under the cursor. As I move the cursor,
I here the selected item and then it's short description.
I'm currently loged into 4 text consoles and one Gnome session on this
system. Which session do you think I just described?
> >stand alone version of Mozilla with speech output.
> Why didn't they go totally free in the Debian sense with this?
>
Probably because they're a commercial company out to make as much as
possible. Releasing the source would allow someone to easily compete
with them.
>
> >group of programs the Linux distro decided to use to get a GUI interface.
> In one way this is a weekness, too. More choices means having to support
> more libs in terms of accessibility and less consistency for the average
> user.
>
Not really. KDE and Gnome seem to have become the two leading desktops.
True, we will only be able to use one or the other of them for GUI
access, ut that will still give us a lot of choices. Remember too, if
there is an X app not accessible, you can modify it's source to use one
of the accessible libs. For some GUI apps, you already have access to
them from the text console. My girl friend uses imagemagick to edit
photos. I could do everything she does by typing commands at a shell
prompt.
> >Enter isn't the default for ok.
> Can this be changed?
>
Don't know for sure. My first guess would be no, but almost everything
can be customized. Gnome has been my only GUI for so long now I'm used
to how it does things. I would make lots of mistakes if I tried to run
Windows again. Remember, I ran Windows exclusively for 4 years before
Linux. I knew I was forgetting my Windows habbits, but your questions
have shown me just how much I've changed.
Hope this helps.
Kenny
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