Hi, Gang!
My system for daily use is Trisquel 5.0, I18N Edition, on an Asus
netbook, that works very well, with a few minor annoyances. In my
eagerness for the 5.5 release, I downloaded the Beta image, dated
07-March, and am writing this email from this Beta, running as a live
system on a flash drive. I'm running the beta, with orca speech
providing accessibility; here are some impressions.
If lightdm is launched in the live image, orca does not talk during the
login. I just hit the 'enter' key, after what seems a suitable
interval, then, I get the startup sound; then orca starts, as one would
expect. I had no problems paging through the preferences dialogue, and
setting orca up to taste. Once I got orca the way I like, I did some
exploring of the desktop, menus, and bottom panel. I could move among
the panel items, menus, sub-menus, and desktop items, using the cursor
keys, again, with no trouble. Before attempting a wifi connection, I
created a default password keyring, launching seahorse from the menus,
rather than from the 'run' dialogue, as I normally might. This
application is fully accessible. With the keyring set up, I returned to
the bottom panel, located the nm aplet, expanded the menu, found my
access point, entered my key, and got a spoken notification of the
connection success. While on the panel, I checked my laptop battery
status. I could find no volume controls on the bottom panel. Is it
there but invisible?
Since I could not find the controls, I launched the gnome-control-center
app, and made keyboard shortcuts for setting volume, and launching my
browser. This seemed to work as expected. While in the control center,
I quickly set my time and date. This dialogue was very hard to use when
I was installing 5.0, much easier in 5.5.
I located and launched evolution mail, and tried to use it. The setup
dialogues are fully accessible, though orca is slow to echo keystrokes.
Once I set it up, I discovered that evolution's message lists and
bodies are not readable. What to do? Install thunderbird, of course.
For testing purposes, I tried using synaptic, then the add/remove
programs app. Orca will not speak in these apps, perhaps it will not
speak any gui apps that need root access? I opened a terminal and used
apt-get to install t-bird. This works perfectly!
Using abrowser and t-bird is flawless, at first glance, with more
testing to be done.
With t-bird and abrowser going, I turned to editing with gedit. When
gedit is set to wrap text at the display margin, long lines (those with
actual line breaks well past the margin) are read repeatedly, when
moving with the up and down arrow keys. I have to view current word or
character to find where the insert point really is. To work around
this, I set gedit not to wrap the display. This causes orca to read one
line per-press of up or down. I can interrupt speech with any key
press. Navigating and reading the file chooser dialogues is a bit
clumzy with orca. Far easier and quicker to type the full path.
Two final notes:
When pressing 'alt+tab', to switch among the running apps, orca does not
speak the name of the app that would get focus if I were to release the
keys (this is announced in 5.0). This is very inconvenient! Also, when
caps-lock is used as the orca 'modifier' key, the lock state gets passed
through to the focused app. To use the orca modifier, I have to tap the
key twice. This minor bug is in 5.0, too.
HTH,
Dave
On 03/07/2012 10:29 PM, [email protected] wrote:
you should really change your window-borders to the Trisquel ones. these
look awful with the theme.
