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Re: [orca-list] The State Of Linux Accessibility

Hi,
Reacently, there was a discussion regarding audio on the blinux list.
One can use lillypond to produce sheet music.
A number of other tools were discussed there as well.
If you want to do multi track recording, there is nama.
People serius about music under linux use jackd as a sound server.
All I am saying, is that there are some options available to blind musitions under Linux. If the person is for some reason only prepared to considder software that runs under a GUI, there might be a problem. 
Regards, Willem


On Wed, 5 Aug 2015, Alex Midence wrote:
Audio production is something of a tender spot for me. I did some pretty extensive digging a few years ago on the subject and my findings were frankly disappointing. Fact: Historically, one of the vocations at which blind people have exceled has been music. Some noteworthy blind musicians the reader may be acquainted with include Homer, Ah Bing, Francesco Da Milano, Joaquin Rodrigo, Andrea Bocelli, Ray Charles, Stevie wonder, Jeff Healey, José Feliciano and, last but certainly not by a million miles least Monsieur Louis Braille. 
Now then, the question was posed by a blind musician from the eastern U.S. seaboard if there were anything 
accessible and comparable to Sound Forge and Audition in Windows on the Linux platform.  These are 
professional quality pieces of music software.  I found two of them which most closely matched up in features 
and capabilities.  These were Ardour built on GTK and Rosegarden built on QT.  Be it know that these far 
outstrip something like Jokosh and Audacity in what they can do as they target professional musicians as 
opposed to people dabbling in the odd sound editing project or two.  Neither one of these pieces of software 
were accessible.  Neither was Lilipond or fluidsynth.  So, at this time, there is no accessible way for the 
average blind musical professional to work with any score editing, mixing or sound studio type software in so 
far as I know.  It's a real bummer.  I would *Love* to be proven wrong on this one so, please be my guest.

Alex M

-----Original Message-----
From: kendell clark [mailto:coffeekingms gmail com] Sent: Wednesday, August 05, 2015 4:58 PM 
To: Alex Midence; 'Vincenzo Rubano'; 'Keith Hinton'
Cc: 'orca-list'
Subject: Re: [orca-list] The State Of Linux Accessibility

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hi
Impress is an absolutely valid point. I don't know why orca works with it so poorly, but if I had to guess, 
I'd say a combination of poor libreoffice accessibility support and no orca specific code for it. If no one 
has filed a bug against impress, I'll go ahead and do that now.
As for being able to do things on linux you could do on windows, this is valid, up to a point. The people that usually 
make statements like this, or at least the people I deal with who do,  often mean, "I want to do the same thing on 
linux that I did on windows, using the same programs and doing it the exact same way I used to do it on windows".
Which means, for example, when you tell them that there's no mush z in linux but that there's tintin and a sound pack 
for alter aeon, "that's too hard. I want a gui installer that does all of this for me because that's how windows 
does it. If I can't have that then linux sucks and I won't use it." Pdf files is another area where linux needs 
improving. This is supposed to improve greatly in gnome 3.18, but I haven't tested it yet. Then again, the only 
accessible pdf reader on windows is adobe's own, so while it might work better there, you are limited in what programs 
you can use. None of the open source or alternative pdf readers in windows as far as I know work with any screen 
readers. I'd argue that linux is accessible enough for beginner, intermediate, and advanced work, depending of course 
on the kind of work you do. Audio production is one area where blind people cling to windows. There are people on this 
list who know a lot more about this than I do but if windows win

s out in
 this area then we need to buck up and fix it. For what little audio work I do, download from youtube, 
converting and editing files and audio metadata, linux works absolutely fine and there are gui options for 
all. As for the crackling, this is a well known issue. I understand it has something to do with 
speech-dispatcher's use of the pulse audio api. Luke and jeremy ... something, can't remember his last name, 
are actively working to fix this, which should be available in either a new speech-dispatcher 0.8 release or 
a 0.9 release, I'm not sure yet. But it's definitely known and being worked on. I'd say this in closing. No 
matter which platform you use, linux, windows, ios, android, osx, there are going to be areas where 
accessibility is great and those dark corners where it could be better. It's just the nature of 
accessibility. Linux wins out in my opinion mostly due to it's open source model, it's lack of activation and 
it's ease of maintenance. I can throw a distro on a
 usb dri
ve and boot it on any computer and have a live working environment. I can either use that as is or install it.

I understand osx can do something similar, I've never used it. I say linux wins out because it's not limited 
to a particular brand of computer by license agreements. My two scents.
Thanks
Kendell clark


Alex Midence wrote:
I don't know. I think comparing how well something can be accessibly accomplished in Linux to how well that same task can be done in Windows is a valid exercise as long as you don't make sweeping statements like "The overall accessibility experience in Linux sucks compared to Windows." If you are used to being able to do X on one platform, it is natural to feel you should be able to do it on another just as accessibly and with as little extra effort on your part as you had to expend on the other platform.
With Linux, my main gripe is presentations. I rely on them every day at work since I'm a trainer and they are something of a lifeblood for me. In Windows, we use PowerPoint which Window Eyes, in particular, works extremely well with. Jaws does OK but Window Eyes is absolutely outstanding with it. I can't say the same with Orca and Impress. If I got hired somewhere and their company policy was to have all their class presentations in Impress format, I'd be in deep trouble. I'd have to argue for letting me use Beamer which is a part of LaTEx. I'd still be in hot water because the output is to PDF's which Evince handles only rudimentarily in regular documents and very poorly in pdf slides. I'd have to see about having them let me make a very basic Windows vm so I can use Adobe while that all gets sorted out. I understand there's a way to do this sort of thing with html and javascript but I don't know it yet. So, it would be natural for someone like me to wish that presentations were as easy to do accessibly in Linux as they are in windows where you don't have to learn a complex markup language to get the job done. 

Just an example. Alex M
-----Original Message----- From: orca-list [mailto:orca-list-bounces gnome org] On Behalf Of kendell clark Sent: Wednesday, August 05, 2015 4:22 PM To: Vincenzo Rubano; Keith Hinton Cc: orca-list Subject: Re: [orca-list] The State Of Linux Accessibility
hi This is partly valid and partly not. The stuff about unlabeled controls in gnome is absolutely spot on. While it's gotten quite a bit better in the newest gnome, version 3.16, there are still areas in the control center that aren't labeled well. I've filed bugs against these parts and we're just waiting for fixes. Mate is also pretty accessible. You *do* get access to the applets. It is a bit weird though, and I don't really understand what's causing orca to not like the panel very much. I'd have to say a combination of old gnome 2 code in orca that mate uses and old accessibility code on mate's part. Both can be fixed. We *need* more users. I'm rather tired of people picking on linux's accessibility issues as if they were written in stone. Not that you've done that. The issues can get fixed. It's going to take more orca users doing what I and joanie do. File bugs, test stuff, report what doesn't work. I've not seen much of this here, though granted not everyone has the luxury of sitting around all day like I do. Gnome was part of GSOC this year and they had a couple of people hacking on java atk wrapper specifically to bring java accessibility up to snuff. Joanie has dropped a couple of hints that gnome 3.18's accessibility will be much better, so I believe her, although I haven't been able to find anything on that. I've used windows, including the latest version from redmond. To be completely blunt, if this is the best ms can put out, we've got it made. The accessibility issues will no doubt get fixed with windows updates, but if this were my first impression of windows I'd be saying it's accessibility were going backwards. Tested with the latest windows 10 RTM build. We just need to focus on makeing an already great OS even greater. We do this by filing bugs, testing features. We don't do it by looking at what windows does or does not do better and constantly comparing the two. I'm guilty of this myself sometimes, particularly when I feel close to burning out. That's my two scents Thanks Kendell clark 


Vincenzo Rubano wrote:

Hi Keith,
I know this message will make some people angry, but I want to share my point of view on linux accessibility. This came out rather long, so enjoy a cup of coffee while reading. ;)
First off, when talking about linux accessibility I like to clarify what I think is an important aspect: fragmentation is a problem for accessibility. Since every piece of software can be configured with different options/different library versions/different parameters and each distribution can make a lot of decisions on these aspects, it’s hard to say what’s accessible and what is not. As you can see, there are too many variables to consider. Too many for my tastes…
This being said, we have to distinguish between command line accessibility and GUI accessibility. If we talk about command line, we’re in a great situation. Just choose a kernel which is optimally configured for speakup (i.e. the debian kernel starting from version 3.2 or the Talking Arch one are two examples that I’ve used). If we talk about GUI, well, that’s another story…
The only “accessible” desktops out of the box are Gnome and Mate. Please note the quotes wrapping the “accessible” word, their meanings will be clearer after the lines below. Gnome works, but there are some areas of the Gnome-Shell that are completely inaccessible for Orca. Gnome Control Center has unlabeled controls scattered here and there with some of them being not usable at all and Gnome Tweak Tool has the same issues plus a few focus-related ones. Evolution, the default mail client included in Gnome, is completely inaccessible (1). There are other Gnome pieces that are not accessible, but my memory does not recall their names. Tested with Gnome 3.14.3 and Orca 3.14.3. Mate is a Gnome 2 fork. It is accessible, if you mind not having access to most of the applets (i.e. the applet to control wifi connections) and having unreliable multiple file selection due to Orca not announcing properly when an item is selected or not. Add a few other issues here and there and that’s the Mate situation. 
Tested with Mate 1.8.* and Orca 3.14.3.
Libreoffice/openoffice are the only complete office suites for linux. Saying that they’re accessible is really an abuse of the word, though. Libreoffice Writer can be used to some degree, but if you need to have complex formatting, multiple tables with many rows and columns and form controls embedded in your document, then be prepared to a lot of accessibility issues. And remember that you won’t be able to use structural navigation within LibreOffice documents due to a Libreoffice bug sitting in their queue for years. Impress, Calc, Base and Math have even more severe and critical accessibility issues that make them far from being usable if you’re blind. Tested with Libreoffice 4.3.* and 4.4.* with Orca 3.14.3. Notice that LibreOffice seems to run a little bit better under Debian than under Ubuntu, but don’t ask me the reason why.
The only decent way to browse the Web with orca is using Firefox. There’s not too much to complain about that, if you don’t mind having a lot of troubles with complex applications such as webmails and with websites that often refresh the page via ajax. Also, make sure to enable the Orca configuration option to show one control for each line in a web page, otherwise you’ll have a lot of latency whenever you get to a line with more than 
10 controls (i.e. 10 radio buttons). (2)
Let’s spend some words on the Speech Dispatcher/Alsa/PulseAudio thing. Wow, too many parties involved, don’t you think so? Anyways, I’ve always had two issues: 1. From the SpeechDispatcher configuration, enable a module which is not present in SpeechDispatcher (i.e module for Pico under a Debian installation). Restart the SpeechDispatcher service and… Voilà, no speech at all! And no way to recover, unless you can remotely access your machine or you have a Braille display or sighted assistance to rely on. Tested with Debian Wheezy/Jessie. 2. While the computer is of, plug in your headsets. Turn on the computer. Unplug the headsets: you would expect audio to come from your laptop speakers, but you won’t get audio output at all. Plug in again your headsets and… Audio is there. Tested under Debian Wheezy/Jessie and Ubuntu-Mate 14.04.
Finally, let me spend some words on development. Accessibility bugs that can be fixed/worked around in Orca get fixed rather quickly, but the problem is that those fixes get to end users too slowly for my tastes. If a bug is in the accessibility infrastructure (i.e. pyatspi, atspi, atk and others), then they’ll be sitting there for years. Not to mention bugs within Gnome itself or third party apps/frameworks (LibreOffice and Qt just to mention two examples).
(1): Evolution accessibility is improving from what I can read, but currently it’s tricky to get to the message body after you open it. There is thunderbird as an alternative, but if you are like me and use more than 5 different mailboxes with 20+ different folders and thousands of messages, you won't find Thunderbird a great piece of software to work with in terms of accessibility.
(2) Recently, there has been some work to improve these aspects in Orca. We’ll see them in a 3.18 or something like that release, so be patient if you need some serious accessibility support within web content. 


Vincenzo.
Il giorno 05 ago 2015, alle ore 08:30, Keith Hinton <keithint1234 gmail com> ha scritto:
Hi folks, it has been a very long while since I have posted to the Orca mailing list. In fact, more than a year. I was writing in to find out from people who know what they are talking about what the current state of Linux accessibility is with Orca, etc. I was wondering how the major Linux distributions like Fedora, Open Sues, etc are doing with Orca, Speech Dispatcher, and generally over all how is Linux these days? I have avoided Linux for a long while because I have a friend who believes actually, who is utterly convinced that linux accessibility is going backwards. But I don't honestly know for sure if that is so. So, I naturally question him and would like to know from those of you out their who are involved in Linux accessibility generally how do you think Linux is? WouldI be able to run something under Gnome these days like Virtual Box? How does Linux perform with the latest and greatest CPUs, multi core SMP hardware and such from your experiences>? My friend says to me that most of you are using old clunky outdated hardware which is why you don't get Speech Dispatcher or Orca subsystem crashes, etc. But I haven't used Linux in so long that I figure the time is now to actually just come out and ask and see what responses I get. Obviously, I know that everybody will have their own distribution prefferences. But I'm not here to start a war on Ubuntu, vs Fadora, etc. I am trying aside from an OS specific fight to figure out what the current honest state of Linux accessibility is. Is it actually falling back and going backwards and thus dying out? I don't know. Is it worth grabbing something like the latest oh, I don't know, Open Suse, Fadora or similar and giving Orca a spin?
So I was hopeing some of you out their might have a better idea. Thanks! 

All the best, Keith
_______________________________________________ orca-list mailing list orca-list gnome org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/orca-list Visit http://live.gnome.org/Orca for more information on Orca. The manual is at http://library.gnome.org/users/gnome-access-guide/nightly/ats-2.html 







The FAQ is at http://live.gnome.org/Orca/FrequentlyAskedQuestions
Log bugs and feature requests at http://bugzilla.gnome.org Find out how to help at http://live.gnome.org/Orca/HowCanIHelp
_______________________________________________ orca-list mailing list orca-list gnome org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/orca-list Visit http://live.gnome.org/Orca for more information on Orca. The manual is at http://library.gnome.org/users/gnome-access-guide/nightly/ats-2.html 





The FAQ is at http://live.gnome.org/Orca/FrequentlyAskedQuestions
Log bugs and feature requests at http://bugzilla.gnome.org Find out how to help at http://live.gnome.org/Orca/HowCanIHelp
_______________________________________________ orca-list mailing list orca-list gnome org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/orca-list Visit http://live.gnome.org/Orca for more information on Orca. The manual is at http://library.gnome.org/users/gnome-access-guide/nightly/ats-2.html 



The FAQ is at http://live.gnome.org/Orca/FrequentlyAskedQuestions
Log bugs and feature requests at http://bugzilla.gnome.org Find out how to help at http://live.gnome.org/Orca/HowCanIHelp 


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_______________________________________________
orca-list mailing list
orca-list gnome org
https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/orca-list
Visit http://live.gnome.org/Orca for more information on Orca.
The manual is at http://library.gnome.org/users/gnome-access-guide/nightly/ats-2.html
The FAQ is at http://live.gnome.org/Orca/FrequentlyAskedQuestions
Log bugs and feature requests at http://bugzilla.gnome.org
Find out how to help at http://live.gnome.org/Orca/HowCanIHelp
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