Hi list, It's been ages since I've posted here. In brief I planned doing GTK plus 2 development under VmWare but found out that the Cygwin console and my Windows based AT was a much easier route at this point. Now I just popped in the Edgy live CD in my main music machine and wonder of wonders it came up with Orca right after the boot. This is the first time a LInux distro has recognized my TerraTec EWS88 MT soundcard. I recall how tough getting Gnopernicus speaking was back in RedHat so things have certainly advanced a whole lot.
As it works this well, now I'm thinking of possibly installing Edgy in addition to the XP I already have. But if I'm going to do any real work in Linux, rather than just play around with it, I'd need to find out a few things. 1. Is eSpeak already included in Edgy and if it is how do I enable Finnish support and also make it show in the Orca list of speech synths? Being a GUI guy at heart, I do hope we'll get graphical means of adding speech synths some day. I vaguely recall it was about editing some text file for a generic speech synth driver. eSpeak is extremely important to me as without Finnish support I have to return to the MS monster to read my mail, argh. Also I do hope Orca has a shortcut for switching the language in which Screen text is being read as I alternate between Finnish and US English quite often, especially in e-mail and the Web. 2. Is there a decent, accessible MIDI sequencer for Gnome out there? NOthing fancy, multiple tracks, event list, quantize with a strength parameter and the ability to support several hardware MIDi synths with instrument names would be good enough. A friend of mine whose a long-time LInux user told me about the upcoming Ubuntu Studio and that Ardour 2 will have MIDI and is GTK+ based. I might be better off waiting for the Studio to come out for an easier time with music making. 3. I use a combo of speech, braille and magnification to manage. There are a couple of questions I have regarding the visuals. firstly, how should I set up the magnifier screen coordinates in Orca to get a wide, rectangular window at the bottom of the screen similar to a docked Microsoft Magnifier, if you will. By default the magnifier takes all too much space in my opinion. Secondly, and this is a long pet-pieve of mine, is there still no graphical way of seting up the colors in a Gnome theme? I like how KDE does it immensly but too bad QT4 support isn't mainstream just yet. I've tried a couple of times to find out official docs or an easy tutorial of how the theme files need to be modified to simply change some of the background colors but haven't been succesful so far. For me it is extremely important that elements have a contrast difference to stand out from each other, even without magnification. So black buttons, menu highlight and title bars, dark turquoise dialogs and off-white fields would give nice contrasts to me. None of the themes are good enough in this regard. Redmond is one of the best. Surprisingly, the high contrast schemes, just as in Windows, are totally black or white. This means that i cannot tell easily where a dialog ends and a field inside it begins so this is actually one of the worst schemes for me personally. I also find pure white a bit dazzling in the long run. 4. Finally, how do I determin for sure whether a piece of hardware is compatible with Ubuntu. I.e. is there an official hardware compatibility list? I tried looking at the detected hardware in the Gnome device manager but when I move in the tree control it updates extremely slowly as it probably probes the devices on focus change. The update takes several seconds during which the whole tree becomes white, i.e. an invalid client area in MS Lingo I suppose. Also when I tab around the dialog, it says unknown or something along those lines for the text fields that are describing the currently selected device on the right. In particular, I'd need to be sure that my M-Audio (formerly MIDIman) USB MIDI Sport 4x4 as well as its 1x1 counter part do work in Linux. If they don't, that means no music making in Linux as I rely on hardware synths and analog mixing mostly. I might get some particularly LInux compliant hardware for my next machine but not for this old one. The last time I asked about the MIDI Sports, which was a couple of years back, the 2x2 model was supported but 4x4 was not. Any help or advice greatly appreciated. And sorry for the flurry of questions. I thought I'd make sure Linux can actually deliver in the areas in which I need an OS to do that, before even installing a copy on my ancient 40 GB hard drive. Well Linux does much better in this regard than OS X, which currently has no Finnish speech, no way of tweaking the colors as much as I'd like and no accessible MIDI sequencer to my knowledge. -- With kind regards Veli-Pekka Tätilä ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) Accessibility, game music, synthesizers and programming: http://www.student.oulu.fi/~vtatila/ -- Ubuntu-accessibility mailing list [email protected] https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-accessibility
