Re: Proposal: mouse-only Caribou for GNOME 2.30

[Francesco Fumanti <francesco fumanti gmx net>]

Hi,


Taking into account that the resources for accessibility are quite limited, I wonder whether onboard could not be a candidate as an onscreen keyboard for mouse only users instead of duplicating the effort in caribou!?
https://launchpad.net/onboard

In fact, onboard is written in python and does not need at-spi. In fact, it uses the following python extension for emulating keypresses and getting the current keyboard layout from the X server as far as I know:
https://launchpad.net/virtkey 


I hesitated writing this reply mainly for these reasons:
- I do not know whether a maintainer with the necessary knowledge will be available that has enough time for it. 
- When the discussion about porting gok to python started, I asked Ben to look at onboard to determine whether it could be used as a starting point; he replied that it would not suit well for it (or something similar)
- The aim is to keep the part of onboard that is targeted to mouse-only users independent from at-spi. 

Onboard is still having a few glitches at the moment, for example sometimes not showing the correct system layout on international systems, but it should probably nevertheless be taken into consideration.


Would it be a problem to have two different applications, one for mouse-only users and another for switch users? Not excluding a merge of both applications somewhere in the future if it makes sense technically. Maybe that Ben can elaborate on it!?


Please, do not get me wrong: this is intend as a starting point for a discussion about whether it is better to use onboard for mouse-only users instead of starting to write something similar in caribou and let the caribou developer continue his work for switch users.


This email is now Cc'ed to a few additional persons: especially Chris Jones, the original author of onboard that might be able to answer technical questions about onboard and marmuta, that has been working on onboard for a few months and that is currently trying to add prediction to it. (The prediction engine over dbus that also Gerd is working on and that might also be used for caribou. )


Cheers 

Francesco 

Willie Walker wrote:
> Hi Ben:
>
> I support this.
>
>  From the larger GNOME a11y point of view, we have a goal of supplanting 
> AT-SPI/CORBA with AT-SPI/D-Bus.  We have about as solid as a plan as one 
> can get in place with minimal funding and minimal resources to do the 
> work. ;-) I wish I had buckets of money, but I don't. :-(
>
> As you infer in your message, the biggest thing at risk in the 
> AT-SPI/D-Bus port is GOK -- GOK is an extensive user of the CSPI 
> bindings for AT-SPI and there are zero resources or volunteers to port 
> CSPI to D-Bus.  All of the other CSPI consumers use CSPI minimally and 
> have or are planning to port to D-Bus directly.
>
> So, the upshot is that GOK will most likely end up being incompatible 
> with AT-SPI/D-Bus and we need to address this.  I believe the two main 
> categories of users served by GOK are mouse-only users and switch users. 
>  As you mention, Caribou coupled with MouseTweaks will serve a large 
> portion of the GOK users, and perhaps in a more efficient way.  So, 
> you're totally rocking and heading in a great direction.
>
> So that leaves GOK users who depend upon switch-based access.  With 
> XEvIE having suffered a ill-fated death, poor GOK is being attacked on 
> yet another side.  So, I think it may make sense to revisit switch-based 
> access once XInput2 is more prevalent.  At that time, we may also 
> investigate other new ideas for switch-based access such as Nomon, 
> Jambu, etc.  Until that point, we may need to recommend that existing 
> switch-based users remain on GNOME 2.28 -- I'm not sure if that's an 
> acceptable thing, however, and will check.
>
> Will
>
> Ben Konrath wrote:
> > Hi,
> >
> > I'm thinking about shifting the development focus of Caribou from my
> > initial plan. The next stage of my plan was to start adding switch
> > access scanning to Caribou which would work towards text entry
> > functionality for two use cases: mouse-only users and switch-access 
> > users.
> >
> > Looking at other stuff going on in GNOME accessibility community right
> > now, I think it makes more sense to concentrate on making a rock solid
> > application for the mouse-only user case in time for GNOME 2.30. This
> > will allow distros to keep the CORBA base at-spi off for mouse only
> > users (including dwell click users using MouseTweaks) as well as for the
> > other use cases covered by programs using pyatspi. This doesn't help
> > switch only users who will still need to use the CORBA based at-api but
> > at least it's a step to include more users with the DBus based at-spi.
> >
> > I know that I missed the official module proposal for GNOME 2.30 so
> > Caribou will not be officially included but I still think there is value
> > to concentrating on one user group first. And I can defintely have
> > something usable for mouse-only users in time for GNOME 2.30.
> >
> > So what do people think? Any thoughts about this would be appreciated.
> >
> > Cheers, Ben
> > _______________________________________________
> > gnome-accessibility-list mailing list
> > gnome-accessibility-list gnome org
> > http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/gnome-accessibility-list
>
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