Re: [orca-list] Using gnome on a remote system

[Peter Korn <Peter Korn Sun COM>]

Hi Michael,

Sina Bahram and Mike Grace at NC State University developed the Remote 
Access Bridge for just this purpose, and used Orca (among others) to 
provide access to a remote Unix system, with the local system being 
typically but not necessarily a Windows system.  The presented a talk on 
this at CSUN last March.  It looks like their website 
http://www.remoteaccessbridge.com/ is rather sparse, though it was 
updated just last month. 

I believe Sina hangs out in the Blinux mailing list.

The basics of how it works: you use a Java client to initiate an ssh 
connection to the remote host.  On that ssh connection, the bridge will 
tunnel both a VNC connection for the visual desktop, an audio connection 
for non-speech audio, and a speech connection using SSML for the strings 
that are to be uttered.  The Java client connects the VNC connection to 
a local VNC client on your desktop, routes the audio to the speaker, and 
connects the SSML to any of a variety of local text-to-speech engines 
(including MS SAPI).  Orca is running on the remote desktop, and uses 
the SpeechDispatcher support for generating the SSML.

I have only played with this a little bit - no serious banging on it so 
I can't report back on stability.  But certainly what I saw was pretty 
responsive and quite cool.


Regards,

Peter Korn
Accessibility Architect,
Sun Microsystems, Inc.


> Hello,
> I am asking this question on the behalf of someone else. Is it possible
> to use gnome on a remote server and have accessibility? This question
> can extend to either accessing the server from a windows client or a
> unix client. If it is possible what would the setup need to be? Would
> orca be run locally or on the server (assuming the client is running
> gnome as well)? If orca is to also be run on the remote system, how does
> the spoken output get output on the client machine? I know that previous
> question depends on a lot, eg. if the synth is on the local machine or
> server, if the synth is remote, how does the output from the synth get
> to the client audio device, if synth local, how does orca pass the text
> to the synth?
>
> I know there is quite a lot to this, but I don't know this area of
> remote desktops too well as I have only used remote machines through
> text based connections and speakup (locally) or I guess orca (locally)
> could read the output from ssh without a problem. The access to gnome I
> believe is more complicated and possibly more likely to not work quite
> as one might excpect.
>
> Thank you
>
> Michael Whapples
>
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