Re: [qubes-users] Screenreader - accessibility

2020-12-14 Thread Michael Carbone

On 12/13/20 5:17 PM, 'Reece O'Bryan' via qubes-users wrote:

Hello,

I am wondering if anyone has any ideas as to how I could run a screen reader in 
Qubes. I use Orca with Debian-based systems, would it be possible to do the 
same thing?
I do realize that blind people that want privacy or an extremely small 
minority. However, I think that people that are blind or that have became blind 
such as myself deserve the same right to privacy. :)


Thank you all very much in advance,

-Reece



Hi Reece,

We are interested in implementing screen-reading support and have an 
open issue about it here:


https://github.com/QubesOS/qubes-issues/issues/5907

as Sven mentions there are some technical/security aspects that make it 
difficult to implement right now, though with a dedicated GUI VM which 
is on the Qubes roadmap this will be made easier.


Michael

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Re: [qubes-users] Screenreader - accessibility

2020-12-13 Thread Sven Semmler

On 12/13/20 4:17 PM, 'Reece O'Bryan' via qubes-users wrote:

I am wondering if anyone has any ideas as to how I could run a screen
reader in Qubes. I use Orca with Debian-based systems, would it be
possible to do the same thing?


I am afraid that's going to be a though one. The way I understand how 
screen readers work is that they interrogate the UI and then provide 
some form of output be it audio or haptic.


In Qubes a lot of energy went into preventing exactly this scenario. My 
high level understanding is that each VM renders their windows onto a 
virtual screen. The areas of these windows are then sent securely as a 
bitmap to dom0 where those bitmaps then get rendered onto the screen.


The entire point being that no VM can see or interrogate any of the 
output of the other VMs and dom0 cannot be compromised because it is 
only dealing with bitmaps.


There might be a way to get Orca or similar tools to work on a per VM 
basis, which might be OK with audio output -- I don't know. But things 
like system wide focus management would require a Qubes specific screen 
reader implementation in dom0 with stubs in each VM.


With the upcoming version of Qubes GUI management will be removed from 
dom0 and instead happen in a dedicated GUI VM, which is even more secure 
and is meant to also make it easier to support different environments 
like GNOME, KDE etc. My hope would be that in this new architecture 
there would be an easier way to support this.



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