Willie, This is fantastic! I've often though about how useful an accessible livecd could be to provide accessibility on borrowed computers at libraries, coffee shops, but I had no idea we were so close with OpenSolaris.
I'll have a look at the ubuntu "F5 accessibility" option and your iso if you provide a link to it. It may be a customization of the grub menu. Willie Walker wrote: > 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 > _______________________________________________ > indiana-discuss mailing list > [email protected] > http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/indiana-discuss > _______________________________________________ indiana-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/indiana-discuss
