Hi All:
This is just an FYI of some midnight work I've been doing -- literally
in the middle of the night due to insomnia. ;-)
I lead the Orca screen reader project, and I've been doing accessibility
work for X Windows, Java, GNOME, etc., almost 20 years.
One of the important developments I've seen in the accessibility space
is an accessible live cd and installer for people with disabilities: I
saw a number of people with disabilities migrating to Ubuntu and away
from a number of distributions this time last year because of Ubuntu's
accessible live CD and installer.
The Caiman work and the distro_constructor have helped enable us to get
moving in this direction. With a number of people's help, I was
actually able to put some missing pieces together and create a live CD
which I could manage to get speaking with Orca. Not perfect, but pretty
neat.
Here's where things stand:
0) Almost everything was already in place. Yeah!
1) I needed to pull in some SFE packages. These were to get me eSpeak
(a very small speech synthesis engine) working. The SFEespeak.spec
file is new as of this morning since I was tired of updating my
IPS the manual way. Here's the extra packages. The *-devel's
probably are not needed.
SFEespeak SFElibsndfile SFEpulseaudio
SFEespeak-devel SFElibsndfile-devel SFEpulseaudio-devel
SFElibsamplerate SFEogg-vorbis SFEpulseaudio-root
SFElibsamplerate-devel SFEogg-vorbis-devel
tarred and zipped, these packages account for an extra 1459233 bytes,
still keeping the iso image small enough to fit on a CD.
2) I also had to hack here and there to get some other smallish
files in place (e.g., the gnome-speech driver for eSpeak). They'll
fall out with a reworked gnome-speech spec file.
3) There's still lots of work to do, and help is welcome:
a) I would love to have an initial dialog similar to
Ubuntu's where the user can select accessibility options.
This is the very first screen you see when you boot from the
Ubuntu live CD, and it allows you to select the assistive
technology you'd like to use for the live session. If you
look really hard at the following image, you'll see an
"F5 Accessibility" option at the bottom of the screen:
http://www.easy-ubuntu-linux.com/images/livecd-boot-menu-zoomed.png
No clue how to do this. But, if it can be done, it might be
a way to dynamically modify the 'jack' user with stuff to launch
Orca and the things it needs.
For now, if I can just make a one-off CD with a modified 'jack'
user burnt on the CD, I'd be happy. Not quite sure how to do
this, though. If anyone wants to push me in the right direction,
I'm all ears. :-)
b) I'd also like to figure out how to start brltty automatically.
Right now, some prerequisite is missing (ld.so.1 _ex_unwind:
can't find symbols), so a little more work is needed before
getting to that.
c) We will need to script a fair amount in Orca for the installer.
These kinds of wizard dialogs wreak havoc on Orca's focus
tracking logic, and we end up needing to provide a custom
script to make sure important information is presented to
the user. Nothing we didn't already know, though, based upon
the investigation we did last year.
d) Things like the network automagic dialog are completely
inaccessible. I don't know what's going on with that at all,
but it doesn't even seem to appear on the accessibility radar
screen. Heck, I don't even know what app is running to cause
that to pop up. If it's the nwamd process running as root,
we have some work to do to modify root's environment (e.g.,
enable accessible and set up a /.orbitrc file).
4) I'm struggling to reproduce these things on a 79b box. Getting there
one step at a time.
In any case, fun stuff. In addition, I'll bet we can get a whole
community of people migrating to Indiana if we can make the accessible
install a reality.
Thanks folks! The Indiana work and the Caiman work are really helping
in many ways. Again, help is welcome, too. :-)
Will
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