Re: Questions about gnome-mag + orca

["Kristian Lyngstøl" <kristian bohemians org>]

On Fri, Mar 28, 2008 at 2:51 PM, Willie Walker <William Walker sun com> wrote:
>  > Gnome-mag:
>  > - Just does magnification.
>
>  It does more, such as various forms of color filtering.  Thanks to work
>  from Rich and Joanie for GNOME 2.22, Orca has a lot more support for
>  various useful gnome-mag features.  The Orca WIKI has a write up of the
>  various features available today:
>
>    http://live.gnome.org/Orca/ConfigurationGui

Ok, I see.

>  > That leaves us with a gnome-mag which, in it's current state, would be
>  > by and large useless due to performance issues.
>
>  Based upon our experiences with real end users at CSUN, it's actually
>  quite a usable solution.  Some users commented that it's even better
>  than some of the more popular Windows solutions.

Ok, this is a lot better than I feared. I was under the impression
from my own brief experiences that just enabling a composite window
manager would turn gnome-mag into a horrible resource hog, I'm glad
that's not the case.

>  At the same time, we want to consider other important things, such as
>  the ability to highlight areas of the screen and/or do other important
>  transforms to benefit a larger population of users (e.g., users with
>  learning disabilities).

I remember we talked about this. I can certainly accommodate most, if
not all of these ideas within Compiz plugins.

>  So....take a look at the two URLs above.  If you're interested, please
>  submit a proposal for the GNOME Outreach task.  My guess is that you're
>  probably one of the better people in the world to do it. :-)

I've read the posts a few times and am very much interested in this task.

My goals would be:

1. Create a dbus-based communication protocol to accommodate things
like text-caret-moved and highlighting. Implement it in Orca and
Compiz.

2. Give Orca the ability to directly configure the accessibility parts
of a composite (window) manager with minimum visual changes to the
current UI.

3. Mirror the functionality gnome-mag has into Compiz. For example the
split-screen magnification and cross hair functions.

The first point should be pretty straight forward. As for closer
composite manager and Orca integration, my idea was to retain the
magnification UI in Orca almost exactly as it is, but when compiz is
running, have the options affect Compiz. This obviously depends
somewhat on the last point, since Compiz currently isn't able to
highlight or draw a cross hair.

The API would be designed to configure any magnification tool over
D-Bus (not just Compiz). This could be combined with the sending of
events (highlighting, text-caret-moved) into one API.

This API could also make the features discoverable, allowing a
composite manager to only support a sub set of the features defined in
the API. The Orca UI could then gray out the disable features, or
otherwise make it obvious that they are not available.

Ideally gnome-mag should transitions to this API too, but it might be
simpler for now to just have Orca magically switch between gnome-mag
mode and "everything else mode" in the background. Given the state of
gnome-mag, that has obvious advantages.

As you may notice, I focus very little on Metacity. I simply don't
know the state of Metacity or how acceptable or difficult it would be
to implement the required changes. I assume it would be quite a lot of
work. Would this be a requirement of the Outreach task, or is it
acceptable to focus on the actual API and use Compiz for the initial
implementation?

- Kristian