Re: gnome-mag and gnopernicus magnifier services TODOs

[Carlos Eduardo Rodrigues Diogenes <cerdiogenes yahoo com br>]

Hi Gunnar,

I leave the gnome-accessibility-list in the e-mail because I think that 
the informations that you could provide can be interesting for the list.

First of all, I want to say that we have a group in a university studing 
accessibility and we want to develop an screen magnifier. We verify that 
the GNOME Accessibility Project is a good project to provide the support 
that is needed by assistive technologies, so here we are.

Second, I want to sorry if some question are very stupid of comprehend a 
lot concepts that can't be easely synthetized. Our experience if free 
software ins't very large. We hope too that we aren't take much of your 
time.

Do you have any screen-shot of your magnifier?

You are developing it to be an X solution or it will be tweaked (have 
the look and feel) of a specific window manager? Your objective is to 
make it usable for visually impaired people now? Or things like UI must 
be developed later?

I want to learn more about the internal of X, I think that this way we 
can develop better magnifiers. If X could done something for us I think 
that we can gain in performance. This things could be render text with a 
bigger size in an buffer that we could access and then calculate where 
the text goes in the desired image, so we have better quality in texts. 
Do you know any good reference about this or the best way to know if 
something is good or not, is possibly or not in X is hacking?

What do you think about Xgl and what this can offer for magnification 
services. Do you saw this: http://vizzzion.org/stuff/xgl_wanking.avi . 
What do you think about this magnification? Do you thing that this is a 
good path to follow or the way that you are developing is better (is 
more realistic now)? Do you know if it can be utilizided easely in a X 
server based on OpenGL?

Thanks,
Carlos.

Olaf Jan Schmidt wrote:

> [Carlos Eduardo Rodrigues Diogenes]
>  
>
> > How I yet said, I saw the 'diopter' application developed by Keith
> > Packard that do a COMPOSITE-based magnifier in the xapps directory of
> > the free desktop cvs tree. Is this software that you are saying about?
> > Do you have any reference where to find informations about this and
> > contact the developers?
> >    
>
> No, Bill is speaking about a new screen magnifier my brother is writing as his 
> diploma thesis. The new magnifier will contain a new X.org composition 
> manager and support more features for partially sighted people than all 
> existing screen magnifiers (including Lunar and ZoomText). The current plan 
> does include braille support or full screen reading support (which are not 
> needed by partially sighted people).
>
> Gunnar's application will be available open-source, but I think he wishes to 
> finish it first, which might take some more months. I am cc'ing him, so you 
> can contact him for questions.
>
> Olaf
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