Re: [orca-list] about the new sonar distro



I don't use many qt apps. But I do use mumble and I would say it is 99% accessible. Past releases of Ubuntu and qt-at-spi didn't work that well for me. So With mumble it is very accessible now.
 On 08/31/2012 03:06 PM, Hank Smith wrote:
what about qt apps?
have u tested any qt accessibility yet?
Hank
On 8/31/2012 12:03 PM, Doug Smith wrote:

Hi, everyone, this is Doug Smith. Lately, I have been made aware of the new sonar Linux distro for the blind. I have to tell everyone this. I am using it right now, installed on my production machine and I am liking what I am seeing.
I have to give you a really honest opinion of the distro, and I 
will.  There are several characteristics of the system that I really 
like.
1. I got the classic version and it is running like a top.  On the 
stock ubuntu with unity 2d, I seem to have had a problem when 
pressing return immediately after entering something into the dash 
panel.  On the other hand, I had a few accessibility problems with 
it.  Not here.  This thing is running so fast that, I would have 
thought it was a new machine if I hadn't know any better.
2. ease of installation: This system was so much faster to get 
installed than the stock ubuntu, I couldn't believe it.  Real good 
stuff!!
3. On the stock ubuntu with unity 2d, the graphical desktop locked up 
on me.  This really ticks me off, as this kind of thing has been a 
problem since I started working with talking computers 27 years ago 
this month and I still see it sometimes. It happens a lot less in 
text mode than graphical.  Not on here.  This thing has not hung on 
me one single time.  It's really great.
4. Orca never drops on here.  It didn't on the regular ubuntu 
neither.  I want to congratulate the Orca development team on 
stopping that idiotic crashing behavior Orca used to have.  It's 
running smooth as silk.
On the stock ubuntu with unity 2d, the keyboard shortcuts I had to 
set myself were constantly coming undone.  I couldn't depend on 
alt-tab or alt-f4 to be working from session to session. When I found 
out that I had to remove the ~/.gconf/apps/metacity directory from my 
home folder, I thought all would be well.  It wasn't.  I still fought 
a running battle with the window manager over writing its config to 
my home directory.  Then I fixed it. It was a dirty hack and a major 
cludge, but it worked.  I removed this file then, as root, did this:
touch ./.gconf/apps/metacity

and this created the new file to replace the configuration directory. Well, that wasn't good enough, so I had to put it back and using the chmod command, remove all permissions, read, write, and execute from all users. Problem solved. Not on here. All the keyboard shortcuts have stayed around, even after upgrading the system. It's great.
6. On the other side, ubuntu with unity 2d, the sound continually 
muted out on its own from session to session.  I have never seen this 
in my life, and I am not sure if any of you have or not, so I will 
attempt to describe it.  Turn on the machine and do some work. All 
will be well.  When the machine was turned off and allowed to cool 
overnight, then restarted again the next day to do other things, no 
sound.  I had to have some eyes in here so many times it was really 
getting bad. Well, adding pavucontrol and the ppa:ubuntu-audio-dev 
repository together solved the problem.  No more pulseaudio 
problems.  I also did this on here, and pulseaudio is really not all 
that hideous.  It works perfectly well except for the distortion for 
a few seconds when it starts.  How does pulseaudio avoid this on the 
live cd? I guess it's just because it's so slow in getting Orca and 
friends started that all that must be out of its system before you 
hear it.
7.  This sonar stuff has a really good and fast boot time even though 
I have a few extra daemons on here which start at boot time, this 
thing really starts up fast.
I hope the author of sonar gets this.  I want to talk to him on 
mangler or something and let him know personally, rather than just in 
writing how good this distro is.  Please keep gnome classic on this 
system, and you've got a lifelong user.  If the sighted world is 
going to tell me that I have to use a graphical desktop on my machine 
just to get hold of the same functionality and information everyone 
else has access to, I'll be shot down in flames if they're going to 
tell me what OS or desktop to use.  And, by the way, thunderbird 
accessibility on here is perfect.  I'm using it to write this message 
right now.

I just have one question about thunderbird. How do you set it up such that all the messages in a thread are not transmitted back and forth every time you send a mail? I hate that with a passion and I hope someone can tell me how to set it up such that I just send what I wrote and not a quadrilion other messages attached onto it each time I post to a list.


Thanks.







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