Hello, Firstly let me briefly introduce myself. I have been using Linux for some years now, originally starting out in text consoles but for the last couple of years more and more in the gnome desktop. I am a blind computer user so rely on assistive technologies such as orca http://live.gnome.org/Orca. My main history has been on distributions such as slackware and debian, however I felt may be time to start looking around (partly as I want to do some work on promoting the accessibility in Linux and for that I may be better with a distribution such as fedora).
Now to the actual main subject. I just tried installing fedora 12 from the LiveCD. In the main the process is reasonably accessible (there are a few points I would alter for a really good user experience, but still usable), however when I went to reboot the system after running the installer I hit a big show stopper, the first boot application is inaccessible and I couldn't find any work around. The issue is that it runs before loading the full gnome desktop so I can't launch orca and there is no text based screen reader (eg. speakup or YASR). I have one question, why does fedora use this first boot application? other distributions seem to be able to do all that this does (I read the quick start guide for details of what the first boot application does) on the LiveCD installer (eg. opensuse, opensolaris, GRML's grml2hd, etc). Would it be possible for these things to be dealt with on the LiveCD? If there is a good reason why some may want the first boot application, may be it could be an optional thing (eg. in the liveinst programme we have a checkbox for "Use first boot application", if ticked the first boot application will be used, if unticked user configuration will be done in liveinst). Another alternative, may be not so satisfactory to me, have some sort of accessibility for first boot. This would take the form emit a sound (may be a beep) when first boot starts, the user could use a keyboard shortcut to load a screen reader. May be accessibility for first boot could be set to start automatically on the LiveCD (may be a check box, may be if accessibility is enabled on the LiveCD accessibility for first boot could be enabled). The big question would be though, what screen reader will work with first boot? I am sorry I can't answer this as I can't see the first boot application and so don't know if it is text based, GTK based, etc.
Other than the speakup modified fedora (which I don't think is an official fedora distribution) there is no accessible way for a blind user to install fedora. Anyway for what I need the speakup modified fedora will not do as it uses the text based installer and so will use the whole disk, but I have windows on that disk and want to preserve the windows installation. The LiveCD looks like the most promising solution for installing fedora if the show stopper problem I mentioned above is solved.
I will quickly say why I feel accessible install of fedora should matter. While accessibility of the desktop system itself is important, many computers don't come with Linux preinstalled, and so many users may need to install it themselves. Now the LiveCD gives me a good chance to see what fedora can do (in fact I will be honest and say in the past that generally fedora has been overlooked by me, but I decided to look at the LiveCD and it has changed my mind), and if you like what you see you want to get it installed. Its not always possible to get sighted assistance and sometimes the sighted assistant may not be as computer knowledgeable as you would hope, so it would be best if the blind user could install it independently. Other distributions have made it possible for blind users to do an accessible install (ubuntu, opensuse, opensolaris, slackware and debian, possibly others) and so fedora falls behind in this respect. Talking personally, I cannot proceed with fedora at the current time as I don't have the appropriate support to get beyond the first boot screen.
I would be prepared to work with fedora developers to try and solve this major issue and other smaller issues regarding the accessibility of installing fedora from LiveCD. Would it be best for me to ask this else where or approach anyone in particular?
Michael Whapples
Michael Whapples wrote:
If there is a good reason why some may want the first boot application, may be it could be an optional thing
Disabling firstboot is possible; just create the file "/etc/sysconfig/firstboot" with the following line: RUN_FIRSTBOOT=NO
Maybe some GUI could do that for non-technical users.
The big question would be though, what screen reader will work with first boot? I am sorry I can't answer this as I can't see the first boot application and so don't know if it is text based, GTK based, etc.
Like most RedHat system administration tools, firstboot is written in Python and features both a text-based frontend and a GTK/Glade frontend. It prefers the full screen Glade frontend in case X is available. Otherwise it falls back on /usr/bin/setup, which a basic ncurses-looking menu to the usual system-config-* text-based tools.
Cheers,
Marc
Hello, Thanks for some of that info Marc, I probably can say some more helpful stuff now.
Firstly the firstboot application. If it is written in GTK this has some promise for use with orca. I don't know the exact environment firstboot runs in (IE. is it gnome or is it GTK compiled to use the frame buffer directly, etc). To make it possible for orca to access firstboot we would need at-spi started and from the users view it would be good to have a key press to start orca (I understand you wouldn't want orca running by default). I am assuming that for a liveCD install the firstboot application will use the GTK frontend, if not then I need to consider the text console screen readers (I hope this is not the case as I don't think fedora has a text console screen reader by default and it could be harder to push for extra stuff to be added, space can be very restricted on a LiveCD).
Now to the other alternative, disabling first boot. I actually got a message from another list where someone seemed to remember being told to disable first boot with chkconfig, does this do basically the same thing? Also if I were to disable firstboot, would I also need to manually add a user account? It would be useful for me to know this and then I could look at may be putting together a GUI app to do these things from the LiveCD (initially it would be something I would write and users might need to download to the live environment but I would hope over time it could become integrated into the fedora LiveCD).
Once this firstboot problem is solved at least the install process would be possible. There then would be minor issues, possibly some of them easier to solve. Here are the ones I can think of at the moment (NOTE: I am trying to give full details so it may get quite long, some of them should be very simple to solve hopefully): * Would it be possible to have espeak as the default speech synthesiser? Reasons, I think it is clearer, its more controllable for a screen reader (eg. I don't really detect a speed change when I alter the speed in orca when using festival), espeak is much more responsive than festival (there are moments where I think orca has stopped responding in the installer but its just orca slow to respond and festival makes it worse), espeak supports more languages than English and I think it is smaller than festival. I think the package names are espeak and gnome-speech-espeak that you would need. I have considered this minor as users can use the package manager to install the required packages into the live environment, if this were not possible then I would consider this fairly important. * Could we have a start up sound when the gnome desktop is loaded IE. after the log in screen disappears, hopefully as close to the point the user can start using the gnome desktop). The reason is how is a blind user meant to know when the LiveCD is ready to use unless they have something to alert them to the fact. Other distributions have added a "accessibility" option to the boot menu but possibly I like the idea of the start up sound for the desktop better, many question how a blind user should know when the boot loader is waiting for a boot option to be selected and what keys to press for the "accessibility" option. What I am suggesting avoids this problem as they let the CD boot, wait for the start up sound, may be give it a few seconds for the desktop to continue to load as the sound normally happens a little before the desktop is completely loaded, then they press alt+f2 for run and type orca and press enter and let orca start guiding them through initial set up questions. NOTE: the alt+f2 and typing orca is standard gnome stuff so isn't a magic distro specific combination. I don't see this option impacting on the "average" user as sound is enabled by default anyway and some systems do have start up sounds. * When I select the icon on the desktop to start the install, orca reports this as inaccessible. Now I have found if I open a gnome terminal and use su, relaunch orca as root and then launch liveinst (again as root, don't know about selecting the desktop icon) then the installer is accessible. There are many reasons why applications running with privileges may not be accesslibe, ranging from a correctly set up /etc/orbitrc to the use of policykit (more recently I think), etc. While I don't know the answer to this specific case, I know such a problem can be overcome as I believe ubuntu solved this (they did suffer from the issue some time ago), opensolaris has none of this issue, etc. This is important to solve as relaunching orca as root does mean a temporary time without speech output for the user. * When I need to select the timezone orca is very unresponsive (this is where using festival really shows but even using espeak is painfully slow at this point). I believe the issue partly stems from the combo box containing so many items, could this be split into two combo boxes (eg. one for continent and one for country in that continent, this is what opensolaris does). Even if my suggestion doesn't improve the responsiveness of orca, splitting the selection would be good as having to use the keyboard to cursor through so many choices is very slow anyway.
Sorry if the above seems a bit much, I don't mean it to seem that way, I just felt may be give full details of what the other issues are as I imagine some of them might be very easy to solve.
Michael Whapples
On 01/-10/-28163 08:59 PM, Marc Herbert wrote:
Michael Whapples wrote:
If there is a good reason why some may want the first boot application, may be it could be an optional thing
Disabling firstboot is possible; just create the file "/etc/sysconfig/firstboot" with the following line: RUN_FIRSTBOOT=NO
Maybe some GUI could do that for non-technical users.
The big question would be though, what screen reader will work with first boot? I am sorry I can't answer this as I can't see the first boot application and so don't know if it is text based, GTK based, etc.
Like most RedHat system administration tools, firstboot is written in Python and features both a text-based frontend and a GTK/Glade frontend. It prefers the full screen Glade frontend in case X is available. Otherwise it falls back on /usr/bin/setup, which a basic ncurses-looking menu to the usual system-config-* text-based tools.
Cheers,
Marc
Michael Whapples a écrit :
I am assuming that for a liveCD install the firstboot application will use the GTK frontend, if not then I need to consider the text console screen readers (I hope this is not the case as I don't think fedora has a text console screen reader by default and it could be harder to push for extra stuff to be added, space can be very restricted on a LiveCD).
I think the main use case for the (legacy?) text-based interface is to work around crashing video drivers. So focusing on the GTK frontend is probably OK, even when X not working has recently become more frequent thanks to Intel. I mean: working around others' bugs should not be the primary focus.
Now to the other alternative, disabling first boot. I actually got a message from another list where someone seemed to remember being told to disable first boot with chkconfig, does this do basically the same thing?
More or less. chkconfig prevents /etc/init.d/firstboot to run, while RUN_FIRSTBOOT=NO makes it exit prematurely. I guess chkconfig requires an inconvenient chroot.
Also if I were to disable firstboot, would I also need to manually add a user account?
Yes, that's the main thing firstboot seems to be doing. Again, mind chroot; there must be a reason why firstboot does not run earlier than at first boot.
There then would be minor issues, possibly some of them easier to solve. Here are the ones I can think of at the moment (NOTE: I am trying to give full details so it may get quite long, some of them should be very simple to solve hopefully): [...] Sorry if the above seems a bit much, I don't mean it to seem that way,
I think it would be best to start a different discussion thread for each topic of significant importance.
I suspect you will get much better answers on some anaconda mailing list. Little seems liveCD-specific so far.
Cheers,
Marc
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