Hi all,
Well, after a bit of playing around, I did get Ubuntu Oneiric to
install. On my machine, I had to press ctrl+s regularly throughout the
boot-up process. This was the only way I got the drums to play,
otherwise, it would go straight to the Unity-3D environment without
giving me the chance to enable the accessible installer. The machine, if
it makes a difference, is a Samsung NF310 netbook. After playing with it
for most of the day, I've some observations, both positive and negative,
that I'd like to note.
First off, let me say that I've enabled the proposed updates repository
and updated before I started using Oneiric.
** Desktop environment
1. The toggle screen reader key is not enabled by default. I really
believe this should be set, if not globally, than at least when an
accessible install is done. There seems to be no way to reliably force
Orca to load on login, so setting such a shortcut would be of great help.
2. Many menu items in the application menu (the new global Unity menu
bar) read as check items when they are not, and those that are often
incorrectly report their status. Also, the top menu bar items read as
"label" rather than as a menu item. The check item issue is, imho, more
important than the misreading of the label role, as it sometimes reports
incorrect status. This bug bleeds over into all applications that
integrate with the global menu bar.
3. The QT support works very well. An excellent job on that one, this is
a landmark in accessibility for us.
4. Some status menu items, such as the battery, read as simply "image."
Does anyone have a reliable way to check the battery status without
going into a terminal, since this icon doesn't read?
5. Privilege escalation is working properly. Excellent.
** Mozilla (Firefox and Thunderbird)
1. Internal frames on some web pages seem to cause Orca to say "grayed"
until you arrow past them. This makes reading of these frames difficult
and, if one is not careful, tabbing around too quickly in these areas
will cause Firefox to lock up. Anyone else see this?
2. Firefox's pop-up messages, such as that when you install a new add-on
and need to restart, seem to cause a complete inability to move focus
via the keyboard save for using Orca's mouse click features. This
doesn't seem to happen all the time, and I've not found a pattern to it.
This seems to be a new problem, as I don't recall having this issue when
using Firefox with Orca in GNOME 2.
3. Thunderbird seems to be remarkably unstable. It's responsive when it
works, but often when deleting messages it will crash on me without warning.
4. Both mozilla products are more responsive than they were in GNOME 2,
a huge positive.
** Others
1. What happened to Orca's ability to automatically read Empathy? Not
only are the chat features to read prior messages and automatically
speak incoming messages absent, but the contact list doesn't read
properly once I arrow down past the first three items or so. The focus
moves, but Orca doesn't say anything. Arrowing up back to the first
three items will cause them to speak, but nothing I do will get the
items below it to read when this happens. I've not found a pattern to it
but, when it does, a restart of Empathy is needed before the contact
list will read again. I'd rather not have to use Pidgin, but I might
need to do so until this gets fixed.
2. Is there a way to get Orca to come up at the login screen without
having to switch display managers?
3. What are the lenses in the dash supposed to do? When I switch between
them, Orca doesn't say anything and nothing different seems to appear.
The dash looks and behaves the same no matter what lense I seem to have
selected.
That's all for now. Anyone confirm some of these issues? A great job
over all, and congrats to the Ubuntu devs for this. We're not quite
there yet, but I'd say we're closer to having a fully accessible Linux
desktop than we've ever been before, and another version or two might
just put Ubuntu up there with OS X for built-in access.
Thanks
--
Ubuntu-accessibility mailing list
[email protected]
https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-accessibility
