feedback regarding a11y in squeeze
Hi List,
I wanted to share my thoughts and problems regarding a11y in squeeze.
Yesterday I've installed with a netinst iso and run into several
problems.
Installing with braille using brltty worked but brltty was not started
correctly after restart because of used braillex Tiny which is not
connected via usb.
However Speech-dispatcher of squeeze has serious bugs
1. It doesn't contain a stable audio driver except pulseaudio.
This is realy bad if a user want's to use a consolescreenreader.
Running Pulseaudio in system-wide-mode is not recommended by it's
developers.
2. libao support was not compiled in.
3. Autospawning works only for one user.
When I try to run a console screenreader as root with a speechd it can't
be autospawned for my other users in the gnome session.
So I upgraded it to speechd-0.7.1 from sid and reconfigured it to run in
system-mode.
to get this working I configured my pulseaudio to use alsa's dmix
plugin. (not recommended as well).
In speechd I changed the socket path to /var/run7speech-dispatcher and
set the SPEECHD_ADDRESS environment variable.
And got other problems:
The packaged python bindings for speechd-0.7.1 don't work correct with
orca.
Espeak changes it's pitch about every two or three words.
This was really frustrating to find and to upgrade that bindings
seperately.
To prevent espeak from changing the pitch frequently I've upgraded the
python bindings and used current git snapshot.
Another problem was orca :-(.
I couldn't use any messaging app which comes with squeeze.
I tried pidgin, gajim and empathy.
Orca was not able to read any of the chat windows :-(.
So I've installed orca's x-desktop branch from git.
Now it seems to work as expected.
Regards
Halim
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