Re: [orca-list] miscellaneous Orca comments

[Janina Sajka <janina rednote net>]

Hermann writes:
> Why do more and more Linux distributors decide to take Speakup away? I 
> think we should try to convince them, that Speakup is really needed by 
> blind/visually impaired people to work with Linux, since I aggree with 
> you, that Orca perhaps never will achieve Speakup's performance.
> But you can't expect Linux beginners to patch the kernel in order to get 
> Speakup.
> An alternative would be yasr, but there's the need to make it work under 
> unicode. A Speech-dispatcher support exists.


The appropriate place to look for acceptance is with the kernel
developer community. The issue has come up several times and even come
somewhat close several times. We need to get over this hump.

Beyond that, there are plenty of other examples of kernel based modules
which have tracking issues similar to Speakup's. Like everything else
kernel code continues to evolve--now at over 1,000 lines of code
per day. Any module which integrates into the kernel is at risk. Those
not adopted by the kernel community are more at risk, because only
people who care about those modules are looking out for them. Once
Speakup is in the kernel, keeping it current becomes a kernel community
responsibility.

> Note: I would be happy with the text console, if it were possible to 
> develop a modern sophisticated web browser and a word processor. I 
> never understood while this doesn't happen, since there's for example a 
> text based spreadsheet.

You are absolutely on the mark. I believe the reason is that most object
oriented toolkits are gui based. But one needn't paint a gui to gain
advantage from a11y properties exposed by a11y aware toolkits. An
interesting real world example is the Levelstar Icon:

http://levelstar.com

It has no screen, but it has gnome.

Janina