Hello, Thanks for some of that info Marc, I probably can say some more helpful stuff now.
Firstly the firstboot application. If it is written in GTK this has some promise for use with orca. I don't know the exact environment firstboot runs in (IE. is it gnome or is it GTK compiled to use the frame buffer directly, etc). To make it possible for orca to access firstboot we would need at-spi started and from the users view it would be good to have a key press to start orca (I understand you wouldn't want orca running by default). I am assuming that for a liveCD install the firstboot application will use the GTK frontend, if not then I need to consider the text console screen readers (I hope this is not the case as I don't think fedora has a text console screen reader by default and it could be harder to push for extra stuff to be added, space can be very restricted on a LiveCD). Now to the other alternative, disabling first boot. I actually got a message from another list where someone seemed to remember being told to disable first boot with chkconfig, does this do basically the same thing? Also if I were to disable firstboot, would I also need to manually add a user account? It would be useful for me to know this and then I could look at may be putting together a GUI app to do these things from the LiveCD (initially it would be something I would write and users might need to download to the live environment but I would hope over time it could become integrated into the fedora LiveCD). Once this firstboot problem is solved at least the install process would be possible. There then would be minor issues, possibly some of them easier to solve. Here are the ones I can think of at the moment (NOTE: I am trying to give full details so it may get quite long, some of them should be very simple to solve hopefully): * Would it be possible to have espeak as the default speech synthesiser? Reasons, I think it is clearer, its more controllable for a screen reader (eg. I don't really detect a speed change when I alter the speed in orca when using festival), espeak is much more responsive than festival (there are moments where I think orca has stopped responding in the installer but its just orca slow to respond and festival makes it worse), espeak supports more languages than English and I think it is smaller than festival. I think the package names are espeak and gnome-speech-espeak that you would need. I have considered this minor as users can use the package manager to install the required packages into the live environment, if this were not possible then I would consider this fairly important. * Could we have a start up sound when the gnome desktop is loaded IE. after the log in screen disappears, hopefully as close to the point the user can start using the gnome desktop). The reason is how is a blind user meant to know when the LiveCD is ready to use unless they have something to alert them to the fact. Other distributions have added a "accessibility" option to the boot menu but possibly I like the idea of the start up sound for the desktop better, many question how a blind user should know when the boot loader is waiting for a boot option to be selected and what keys to press for the "accessibility" option. What I am suggesting avoids this problem as they let the CD boot, wait for the start up sound, may be give it a few seconds for the desktop to continue to load as the sound normally happens a little before the desktop is completely loaded, then they press alt+f2 for run and type orca and press enter and let orca start guiding them through initial set up questions. NOTE: the alt+f2 and typing orca is standard gnome stuff so isn't a magic distro specific combination. I don't see this option impacting on the "average" user as sound is enabled by default anyway and some systems do have start up sounds. * When I select the icon on the desktop to start the install, orca reports this as inaccessible. Now I have found if I open a gnome terminal and use su, relaunch orca as root and then launch liveinst (again as root, don't know about selecting the desktop icon) then the installer is accessible. There are many reasons why applications running with privileges may not be accesslibe, ranging from a correctly set up /etc/orbitrc to the use of policykit (more recently I think), etc. While I don't know the answer to this specific case, I know such a problem can be overcome as I believe ubuntu solved this (they did suffer from the issue some time ago), opensolaris has none of this issue, etc. This is important to solve as relaunching orca as root does mean a temporary time without speech output for the user. * When I need to select the timezone orca is very unresponsive (this is where using festival really shows but even using espeak is painfully slow at this point). I believe the issue partly stems from the combo box containing so many items, could this be split into two combo boxes (eg. one for continent and one for country in that continent, this is what opensolaris does). Even if my suggestion doesn't improve the responsiveness of orca, splitting the selection would be good as having to use the keyboard to cursor through so many choices is very slow anyway. Sorry if the above seems a bit much, I don't mean it to seem that way, I just felt may be give full details of what the other issues are as I imagine some of them might be very easy to solve. Michael Whapples On 01/-10/-28163 08:59 PM, Marc Herbert wrote: > Michael Whapples wrote: > >> If there is a good reason why some may want the first boot >> application, may be it could be an optional thing >> > Disabling firstboot is possible; just create the file > "/etc/sysconfig/firstboot" with the following line: RUN_FIRSTBOOT=NO > > Maybe some GUI could do that for non-technical users. > > > > >> The big question would be though, what screen reader will work with >> first boot? I am sorry I can't answer this as I can't see the first >> boot application and so don't know if it is text based, GTK based, >> etc. >> > Like most RedHat system administration tools, firstboot is written in > Python and features both a text-based frontend and a GTK/Glade > frontend. It prefers the full screen Glade frontend in case X is > available. Otherwise it falls back on /usr/bin/setup, which a basic > ncurses-looking menu to the usual system-config-* text-based tools. > > Cheers, > > Marc > > > > -- livecd mailing list [email protected] https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/livecd
