On the MacVoiceover mailing list there was a discussion about getting
ORCA running on OSX where the definitive answer a few years ago from
Travis Siegel seemed to come down to this:
"Contrary to popular belief, osx is *not* built on linux, it's built on
FreeBSD, which also is *not* built on linux.
As for porting orca to osx, I'm not sure if this can/has been done,
because orca spends at least part of it's time talking to the linux
kernel, which would have to be translated to native osx/freebsd kernel
calls. I know a large part of orca talks to the x server, and not to
linux directly, and it may be possible to make a port that would work on
osx, but as far as I know, this has not been attempted."
CB
On 11/26/14, 11:58 PM, Eric Oyen wrote:
um yeah. that starts to sound way too complicated. Also, ORCA (the screen
reader I use in Linux) doesn't have a port to macports. it also has a lot of
dependencies that aren't there either. building stuff that strictly uses a
console (or terminal) window is easy and those programs just work. its anything
that requires X which is being the pain.
-eric
On Nov 26, 2014, at 9:13 PM, 'Chris Blouch' via MacVisionaries wrote:
In some ways, once you get outside text-based terminal apps, you're in a whole
other environment in the X11 world. I'm not nearly as familiar with how
accessibility is done there but I'm pretty sure voiceover will not help you
there. From the XWindow Wikipedia page:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_Window_System#Computer_accessibility_related_issues
"However there is no accessibility standard or accessibility guidelines for
X11. Within the X11 standards process there is no working group on accessibility,
however, accessibility needs are being addressed by software projects to provide
these features on top of X.
The Orca project adds accessibility support to the X Window System, including
implementing an API (AT-SPI). This is coupled with Gnome's ATK to allow for
accessibility features to be implemented in X programs using the Gnome/GTK APIs. KDE
provides a different set of accessibility software, including a text-to-speech
converter and a screen magnifier. The other major desktops (LXDE, Xfce and
Enlightenment) attempt to be compatible with ATK."
So it sounds like individual apps implement accessibility rather than having it
baked into the infrastructure or they rely on another layer on top of X11 and
not all apps use this layer. In other words, layers of goo that seems unlikely
for the average person to get all working correctly.
CB
On 11/26/14, 4:46 PM, Eric Oyen wrote:
hello everyone,
are there any interface experts on here that can suggest how to make macport
compiled programs accessible with voiceover? The problem I see is that almost
all of them use X11 as their presentation platform. THere are a few that also
have the AQUA interfaces that can be made, but the utilities I want do not have
this as a feature.
suggestions? comments?
-eric
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