7:50 p.m.
I spent quite a bit of time attempting a few basic tasks plus attempting
an install using the F-11 Live Beta with the Orca screen reader.
It's much improved over F-10. Congrats!
* Default volume level is good--it was way too low with F-10.
* The logout and relogin after setting up Orca now works
* correctly. With F-10 you had to wait "forever" to have
* reasonable certainty that GNOME was restarted, then launch ORCA
* again via Alt+F2. Now it just starts, which is as it should be.
Problem Areas
* It would be preferable to use gnome-speech-espeak as the default
* Orca driver for several reasons:
-- Espeak is more responsive and that's a big deal with a screen
reader. Low latency, quick "shutup," etc., are far more important to
screen reading than high quality speech synthesis.
-- Festival is a particularly bad choice in the "shutup"
department. It will keep speaking until it has finished the string it
was given to say, whatever the user does. This makes for very sluggish
handling. The user must wait for the computer to finish speaking, with
no ability to stop speech and move on. This has things the wrong way
round as computers should wait on people, not people on computers.
* My attempt to install F-11 from the Live desktop icon failed.
* All I could glean is that Orca had the installation screen
* listed as "inaccessible." This is on an x86_64 box using x86_64
* Live. It may not be there in i386.
I wqould like to help debug this, but not sure how to proceed.
Janina
--
Janina Sajka, Phone: +1.202.595.7777;
sip:janina@CapitalAccessibility.Com
Partner, Capital Accessibility LLC http://CapitalAccessibility.Com
Marketing the Owasys 22C talking screenless cell phone in the U.S. and Canada
Learn more at http://ScreenlessPhone.Com
Chair, Open Accessibility janina(a)a11y.org
Linux Foundation http://a11y.org
8:27 p.m.
On Monday, April 06 2009, Janina Sajka said:
Problem Areas
* It would be preferable to use gnome-speech-espeak as the default
* Orca driver for several reasons:
-- Espeak is more responsive and that's a big deal with a screen
reader. Low latency, quick "shutup," etc., are far more important to
screen reading than high quality speech synthesis.
-- Festival is a particularly bad choice in the "shutup"
department. It will keep speaking until it has finished the string it
was given to say, whatever the user does. This makes for very sluggish
handling. The user must wait for the computer to finish speaking, with
no ability to stop speech and move on. This has things the wrong way
round as computers should wait on people, not people on computers.
How do they compare size-wise? In any case, file an RFE against the
gnome-speech package as it looks like that's where the change would need
to be.
* My attempt to install F-11 from the Live desktop icon failed.
* All I could glean is that Orca had the installation screen
* listed as "inaccessible." This is on an x86_64 box using x86_64
* Live. It may not be there in i386.
I wqould like to help debug this, but not sure how to proceed.
The problem here (unfortunately) is that we have to run the install as
root. But the session isn't running as root and hence you don't get any
of the a11y stuff.
While an argument could be made that the work could be done to separate
out the frontend and backend of the install and do everything over dbus
or some other ipc, the root of the matter is that there are too many
other things in the installer pile that are likely to always end up
taking priority. So the question is how can you get an app running as
root from consolehelper to work with the a11y technologies and then I
can try to push those tweaks as needed
Jeremy
12:18 p.m.
Splitting my responses into two emails ..
Jeremy Katz writes:
On Monday, April 06 2009, Janina Sajka said:
> Problem Areas
>
> * It would be preferable to use gnome-speech-espeak as the default
> * Orca driver for several reasons:
> -- Espeak is more responsive and that's a big deal with a screen
> reader. Low latency, quick "shutup," etc., are far more important to
> screen reading than high quality speech synthesis.
>
> -- Festival is a particularly bad choice in the "shutup"
> department. It will keep speaking until it has finished the string it
> was given to say, whatever the user does. This makes for very sluggish
> handling. The user must wait for the computer to finish speaking, with
> no ability to stop speech and move on. This has things the wrong way
> round as computers should wait on people, not people on computers.
How do they compare size-wise? In any case, file an RFE against the
gnome-speech package as it looks like that's where the change would need
to be.
I'm so glad you asked! <big grin>
Looking just at the rpm sizes, espeak is about 1.3M and
gnome-speech-espeak is about 16K.
This compares to about 13.8M for the three Festival packages--so a
significantly smaller footprint. Is Festival present only for Orca? Or
for other applications in the Live image as well?
Also, are you suggesting filing the RFE with the upstream GNOME project?
Or for the Fedora Live product itself?
There are several TTS options supported in gnome-speech-[package.name]
in order to give users the widest possible selection. Espeak is the only
GPL (V3), so more F/OSS license than Festival.
I should hasten to clarify that I have nothing against Festival. It just
doesn't do as well on some key user requirements for screen reader TTS
engines. But, then it was never designed for screen reader use.
Janina
12:21 p.m.
On Tuesday, April 07 2009, Janina Sajka said:
Jeremy Katz writes:
> On Monday, April 06 2009, Janina Sajka said:
> > Problem Areas
> >
> > * It would be preferable to use gnome-speech-espeak as the default
> > * Orca driver for several reasons:
> > -- Espeak is more responsive and that's a big deal with a screen
> > reader. Low latency, quick "shutup," etc., are far more important to
> > screen reading than high quality speech synthesis.
> >
> > -- Festival is a particularly bad choice in the "shutup"
> > department. It will keep speaking until it has finished the string it
> > was given to say, whatever the user does. This makes for very sluggish
> > handling. The user must wait for the computer to finish speaking, with
> > no ability to stop speech and move on. This has things the wrong way
> > round as computers should wait on people, not people on computers.
>
> How do they compare size-wise? In any case, file an RFE against the
> gnome-speech package as it looks like that's where the change would need
> to be.
>
I'm so glad you asked! <big grin>
Looking just at the rpm sizes, espeak is about 1.3M and
gnome-speech-espeak is about 16K.
This compares to about 13.8M for the three Festival packages--so a
significantly smaller footprint. Is Festival present only for Orca? Or
for other applications in the Live image as well?
I believe just Orca
Also, are you suggesting filing the RFE with the upstream GNOME
project?
Or for the Fedora Live product itself?
File it in Fedora bugzilla against gnome-speech. The maintainer may
then want something upstream, but it's the right place to start
Jeremy
2:41 p.m.
Second reply email -- on the installation issue ...
Jeremy Katz writes:
On Monday, April 06 2009, Janina Sajka said:
> Problem Areas
> * My attempt to install F-11 from the Live desktop icon failed.
> * All I could glean is that Orca had the installation screen
> * listed as "inaccessible." This is on an x86_64 box using x86_64
> * Live. It may not be there in i386.
>
> I wqould like to help debug this, but not sure how to proceed.
The problem here (unfortunately) is that we have to run the install as
root. But the session isn't running as root and hence you don't get any
of the a11y stuff.
While an argument could be made that the work could be done to separate
out the frontend and backend of the install and do everything over dbus
or some other ipc, the root of the matter is that there are too many
other things in the installer pile that are likely to always end up
taking priority. So the question is how can you get an app running as
root from consolehelper to work with the a11y technologies and then I
can try to push those tweaks as needed
OK. I'll try and help chase down the latest and greatest advice on this.
For starters:
* I believe Ubuntu Live is doing it. I'll get their image and
* check.
* Fedora's GUI Virt-Manager (System Tools) is doing it
* beautifully. While I'm still having problems learning to set up
* virtual machines, it's not for a11y reasons as this tool is
* working as it should--perhaps 95-98% of the screens. So,
* whatever virt-manager is doing in the gui, is the way to go. I,
* as the ordinary user, am prompted once (and accessibly) for
* root's passwd, and that's that.
* There's a page, not recently updated, on the Orca wiki on this
* topic:
http://live.gnome.org/Orca/SysAdmin
Does any of this, particularly the virt-manager, help?
Janina
Jeremy
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--
Janina Sajka, Phone: +1.202.595.7777;
sip:janina@CapitalAccessibility.Com
Partner, Capital Accessibility LLC http://CapitalAccessibility.Com
Marketing the Owasys 22C talking screenless cell phone in the U.S. and Canada
Learn more at http://ScreenlessPhone.Com
Chair, Open Accessibility janina(a)a11y.org
Linux Foundation http://a11y.org
8:58 a.m.
On Tuesday, April 07 2009, Janina Sajka said:
Jeremy Katz writes:
> On Monday, April 06 2009, Janina Sajka said:
> > * My attempt to install F-11 from the Live desktop icon failed.
> > * All I could glean is that Orca had the installation screen
> > * listed as "inaccessible." This is on an x86_64 box using x86_64
> > * Live. It may not be there in i386.
> >
> > I wqould like to help debug this, but not sure how to proceed.
>
> The problem here (unfortunately) is that we have to run the install as
> root. But the session isn't running as root and hence you don't get any
> of the a11y stuff.
>
> While an argument could be made that the work could be done to separate
> out the frontend and backend of the install and do everything over dbus
> or some other ipc, the root of the matter is that there are too many
> other things in the installer pile that are likely to always end up
> taking priority. So the question is how can you get an app running as
> root from consolehelper to work with the a11y technologies and then I
> can try to push those tweaks as needed
>
OK. I'll try and help chase down the latest and greatest advice on this.
For starters:
* I believe Ubuntu Live is doing it. I'll get their image and
* check.
* Fedora's GUI Virt-Manager (System Tools) is doing it
* beautifully. While I'm still having problems learning to set up
* virtual machines, it's not for a11y reasons as this tool is
* working as it should--perhaps 95-98% of the screens. So,
* whatever virt-manager is doing in the gui, is the way to go. I,
* as the ordinary user, am prompted once (and accessibly) for
* root's passwd, and that's that.
virt-manager runs all of the UI as the user and then just communicates
with the local libvirt daemon for privileged bits. That's the sort of
split that I don't really see making the priority list of the anaconda
team
* There's a page, not recently updated, on the Orca wiki on this
* topic:
http://live.gnome.org/Orca/SysAdmin
This looks like it might do the trick although some testing is almost
certainly needed
Jeremy
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