I am using both speech and Braille. I have also tried this process without Braille. I have tried installing using the Edgy release and the Feisty Fawn betas, a daily build from March 30 and another from April 4. The results are the same. This is a Fujitsu 1.6 MHZ laptop with 512MB of memory and a 40GB hard drive that seems to run the live CDS fine. I tried all the sets of instructions I could find by googling, but will keep this message from getting too lengthy by quoting only from the shortest document which is in the Ubuntu wiki. >... insert the CD >In order to enable accessibility options, press F5. This >will cause a list of accessibility options to appear: The boot options screen does appear. The access options appear. I've had a sighted person confirm this. I press 3 to choose Orca from the menu. I press Enter, and Enter a second time to boot. After a really long wait, booting finishes, desktop loads, Orca does run. >Within a couple of minutes, Ubuntu will be loaded the assistive technology feature you selected. In the screen reader case, the Orca Preferences dialog >will be open (but will not have focus -- press Alt-Tab to give it focus). In my case the Orca preferences always has focus, it was never necessary to press ALT-TAB. I can alter the preferences fine, but Braille doesn't work unless I run gnome-terminal, and from that window type: sudo su brltty -bauto -d/dev/ttyUSB0 I already know how to use brltty but nowhere do the instructions say that step is necessary, and in fact the orca preferences has Braille already checked, so I wonder how current these instructions really are. I play around with the preferences and the live CD. I can't get the online help to read, but other apps work some of the time. It is disappointing that Help, so crucial for a newbie like me doesn't seem to work well with Orca. Anyway, so now I have Braille and my preferences all set so I go back to the instructions. They read: >The Install icon on the desktop allows you to install Ubuntu onto your hard drive... but then goes on to tell me that way of installing won't work because Orca is somehow tied to my current account. This makes little sense to me; I've used brltty and speakup for several years, and never had an issue like that before. It then gives me a six-step work-around: >1. Press Alt F2 to get into the Run Application dialogue Works fine. >2. Type "gnome-terminal" and press Enter. Yeah that work too. >3. In the resulting Terminal window, type "sudo su" and press Enter. Also works as expected. >4. Press Insert Q to quit Orca. At this point, you will have no speech, but focus is still in the terminal window. Actually, you have to tab to Yes, and press spacebar or enter. but then Orca is gone. >5. Type "orca --no-setup &" and press Enter. This will cause speech to resume, but Orca will now be running as root.
That works, at least Orca doesn't pop up any preferences applet, it displays "welcome to orca" in Braille and speaks it aloud. But after that, Orca just stops responding to keystrokes. The system hasn't crashed, I can see screen activity and there's lots of CD thrashing if I run another app. But Orca is silent. Unfortunately, sighted help, my husband, is occupied, but I can see enough to know it isn't frozen. I tried altering the instructions, since they didn't seem too trustworthy. I tried rebooting, then following all the same steps but running orca without the --no-setup and it seemed happier. It asked me a lot of questions, but then loaded and continued to read me the terminal screen while I tried out some console commands. So I went to the next step in the instructions: >6. Type "ubiquity" and press Enter. After that Orca reads a long incomprehensible list of what appears to be some sort of ubiquity log output. The date repeats frequently and lines begin with ubiquity: etc. However I don't seem to be able to interact with it. When I press enter, it rereads the output, but it is some sort of tty-console output that is automatically scrolling, like typing Cat with the name of a big text file. There is an occasional $ prompt. I have no idea how to capture this output. At this point the system appears to be stuck. The keystrokes for flat review do nothing but cause the output to repeat. I can't break out of it. The system doesn't respond to alt-tab, or alt-f4, but Enter causes more output to scroll. It isn't exactly frozen but I can't switch to another task either. I've tried other variations, such as booting and not pressing F5, just letting it boot, then running Orca with Alt-f2. Orca does talk, but the results are as above. I've tried skipping the gnome-terminal step and just running all the commands by pressing Alt-f2 before each one, and filling in the edit box. No luck there either. Another earlier and longer set of instructions had me running Orca in such a way that it automatically logged me out, then back in again, all automatic, and that was interesting, but it didn't make it possible for the ubiquity command to do anything useful. I tried skipping the brltty step which was never part of any instructions I read anyway. I even tried the desktop install icon, but it seemed to shush Orca as well. I would really like to see instructions with a bit more depth. Why for example do you kill orca, then run it again with the --no-setup option? Is brltty supposed to be already active before Orca? Why are there details about how to set your preferences, but then the next step has you killing Orca, and running it in such a way that it can't use the preferences you just set? The instructions are trying to be user friendly but in not explaining why a step is necessary, they are also only useful if everything works as expected. I'm so new to this Linux-gui stuff I don't really know how to troubleshoot. If you can tell me how to save an activity log and submit it somewhere, I will. --Debee
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