Bug#616397: release-notes: Add an essential note for accessibility issues with charset different than UTF8 on Gnome
I'm not a gnome-orca maintainer, Debian Member, or even a GNOME user,
but I noticed this bug being logged on the debian-doc mailinglist.
See below for an edited version of your proposed addendum, which I
nevertheless don't really recommend adding to the release-notes.
Jean-Philippe MENGUAL wrote:
> "4.5.8.2. gnome-orca (accessibility section)
>
> gnome-orca is a screen reader which allows sight impaired users to
> access to the GUI interface and the GNOME desktop environment.
>
> The users of this package should be aware of the fact that there is
> an important change between gnome suite release 2.22 and 2.30.
Making them aware of exact release numbers for the GNOME suite
wouldn't help them; all they need to know is that the issue is with
post-oldstable versions of gnome-orca.
> Indeed, gnome-orca is unable to read and analysing the desktop and
> the window manager window (i.e. nautilus or gnome-panel) if you do
> not use a UTF-8 charset. It means that if you are not using the
> UTF-8 charset, gnome-orca will not read at all the menu at which you
> access to via alt-F1 or the desktop (alt-ctrl-d), or the Run bar
> (alt-F2). It can read other applications such as iceweasel or
> gnome-terminal, but it is not perfectly optimal (e.g. alt-tab is
> very slow with gnome-orca).
I'd recommend leaving out most of these detailed symptoms. In
particular it's unclear whether this Alt-Tab slowness is part of the
issue that needs to be documented in the release-notes or whether it's
just a well-known problem with gnome-orca...
> To workaround the issue, you must do, as root user, dpkg-reconfigure
> locale and choose the locale for your language which handles UTF-8
> by default. Then, reboot the system so that the change would produce
> an effect."
Not so much a workaround, more a fix that's also a long-overdue piece
of general maintenance. You shouldn't need to do a reboot just for
this, but you can't complete a Lenny-to-Squeeze dist-upgrade without
one anyway.
> Hope it will help. I submitted a bug about this, documented by a11y team.
#613086 "orca has issues with a non-UTF-8 gnome desktop".
> I repeat, but it's very important, because before this, I considered
> squeeze unusable for blind people in graphic interface.
Only for the ones who persist in using legacy locales, ignoring the
existing warning in Appendix A3!
http://www.debian.org/releases/stable/i386/release-notes/ap-old-stuff.en.html#switch-utf8
So my revised version would look like this:
The gnome-orca screen reader grants sight-impaired users access to
the GNOME desktop environment. Unfortunately the version in Squeeze
requires a UTF-8 locale; under a legacy characterset, it will be
unable to read out window information for desktop elements such as
Nautilus/GNOME Panel or the Alt-F1 menu.
The recommended fix for this issue is to upgrade to a UTF-8 locale,
as described in Appendix A3.
--
JBR with qualifications in linguistics, experience as a Debian
sysadmin, and probably no clue about this particular package
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