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 -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [email protected] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [email protected] Archive: http://lists.debian.org/[email protected]
