Re: Things to cover in my bits from the DPL talk at Debconf
Along with the good, I’d also talk about the not so good, inaccessibility of QT apps, like Rosegarden, and even CLI applications, like RTV, and Gnu Typist, and the complexity of setting up CLI apps which can be made accessible, like Mutt, VIM, and Alpine.
I’d also demonstrate Emacs with Emacspeak, if possible, to show the—in my oppinion—greatest setup for blind users of Linux, if you can work within the confines of Emacs.
I’d also stress the need for remembering accessibility for all software developers, and the need for accessible educational programs, like typing tutors for adults, not just children, and applications for embossing braille. BrailleBlaster does have a Linux application, but it fails to run, at least with Orca enabled.
Speaking of Orca, I’d stress that it is open source as well, and that if a developer finds that it does not work with their application, it can be scripted to do so.
Seriously, open source has a great opportunity to change the lives of blind people, including people who are not developers, for the better. But, as long as inaccessible frameworks are popular, CLI apps are too complex to be used by normal computer users, and use ways of displaying content that are hard for screen readers to use, Gnu Typist, and accessible educational programs do not exist that meet the need of adult users, Linux for the blind cannot take off in any meaningful significance.
As an Assistive Technology Instructor and sympathizer of free software, I would love to one day recommend Linux as an amazing access solution, but cannot because of the above concerns. The more developers who know of these concerns, perhaps the more good can be done to address them.
> On Jul 12, 2019, at 10:12 AM, Samuel Thibault <sthibault@debian.org> wrote:
>
> Hello,
>
> To the list: feel free to propose ideas, I guess Cindy will sort it out
> :)
>
> Cindy Sue Causey, le mer. 10 juil. 2019 01:28:07 -0400, a ecrit:
>> On 7/8/19, Sam Hartman <hartmans@debian.org> wrote:
>>> But I'd also like to showcase our community and interesting things that
>>> have happened over the last year.
>>
>> So, can anyone think of anything about Debian-Accessibility that would
>> fit into what Sam seeks? MANY people have never, for example, heard a
>> screenreader in action.
>
> I guess Sam could indeed make a demo of his workflow at his usual speed,
> so people have an idea how efficient a blind person can be with a Debian
> desktop, thanks to the work of the community.
>
> Then it could be useful that Sam makes a demo at slow speed, so people
> can get a grasp of what is going on between the normal desktop, the
> screen reader behavior, and Braille/audio output. In case Sam doesn't
> know, for people to see what he is reading on his Braille device, for
> textmode he can enable window highlight in BRLTTY, and for graphical
> mode he can enable the braille monitor by setting enableBrailleMonitor
> to true in .local/share/orca/user-settings.conf
>
>
> I'm thinking that a demo could be made of the compiz-reloaded ezoom
> magnification with focus tracking available in Buster. This can be
> started for instance by running a MATE desktop, running "compiz
> --replace" to replace the marco window manager by compiz, running
> ccsm and in the "Enhanced Zoom Desktop", in the "Focus Tracking" tab,
> check "Enable focus tracking".
>
>
> On the speech synthesis side, it can indeed be interesting to mention
> the work done in Curitiba mentioned by Fernando Botelho. It can also
> be interesting to mention that the University of Mons freed its mbrola
> speech engine. The currently available voice files are not free, but
> this opens up another way for free voices of good quality.
>
>
> Samuel
>
Reply to: