On Mon, 2009-06-29 at 15:13 -0400, Eric S. Johansson wrote: > Bill Cox wrote: > > > If Canonical cares about support for the visually impaired, then it may > > be time to mount a significant effort to put out this fire. On every > > blog I'm reading, the visually impaired are recommending that users > > switch away from Ubuntu. I am currently running Orca and Ubuntu 9.04, > > and I have to offer that same advice. It's more than just removing > > pulseaudio. I've hacked problems for a week straight, and Orca is still > > not functioning properly. There are at least a dozen major problems, > > and not all of them have work-arounds yet. Clearly there was zero > > testing of Orca for 9.04. > > I hope you do not consider me root for pointing out the accessibility doesn't > stop with the blind. As much as you may be dependent on text-to-speech, I am > extremely dependent on speech to text (i.e. speech recognition). Naturally > speaking kind of works under wine and it really needs some dedicated > effort/money/something to get it to the point where we can dictate into any of > the next application. I have some ideas on how to bridge that gap but first we > need a stable NaturallySpeaking.
I agree completely. In fact, for three years, from 1996 to 1999, I had to use Dragon Dictate and Naturally Speaking to control Emacs in order to keep my job as a programmer. Porting Naturally Speaking would be my #1 enhancement request if I could get it. I'm not much of a Wine hacker, though. > current open source speech recognition systems are a waste of time and money. > They are the wrong tool for the application, says the man with 15 years > experience using speech recognition. As a man with three years experience, and being familiar with Sphinx and such, I have to agree, though some of the open-source efforts are commendable. Bill -- Ubuntu-accessibility mailing list [email protected] https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-accessibility
