Re: Making Orca the default screen reader?

[Henrik Nilsen Omma <henrik ubuntu com>]

Al Puzzuoli wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> Just wondering what would need to happen in order to get Orca officially 
> added as part of the desktop, and to ultimately have it become the 
> default screen reader for the gnome environment?
> I understand that gnome 2.14 was just released, and that Orca itself is 
> still in prerelease status, so, this obviously wouldn't be a decision 
> that would be made over night.  however, I believe this should be given 
> strong consideration for a number of reasons:

I agree with all this as well, and I think the ubuntu accessibility team 
 is in general agreement on this. I think orca is the future for free 
desktop screen readers. Not only because it's scriptable, but also 
because making a new start often gives you a chance improve on things 
from the previous generation. We will need to keep using gnopernics for 
its magnifier though until a next-generation xgl-based alternative is 
developed.

For one thing, we have the opportunity to rethink the UI. The current 
one works but is not very useable, whether you have a visual impairment 
or not. We should clearly strive for universal access to the new UI in 
some way, perhaps using both a command line version and a GUI one. I'd 
also like to see much better integration with the gnome desktop on this. 
Perhaps key screen reader settings could be accessed via a panel applet?

I'd be interested to know what is the Orca team's timeline on developing 
the UI. We in the ubuntu team would be happy to collaborate on the 
design and implementation of it. Perhaps we can do some pre-design work 
and then put up a bounty for the implementation, a Summer of Code 
project perhaps.


 - Henrik

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