Ubuntu-accessibility Digest, Vol 54, Issue 23

[Eric S. Johansson]

On 5/23/2010 11:26 AM, Kenny Hitt wrote:

> There isn't a kernel module in this case since they are using sane.
> I regularly build and install kernel modules without needing to reboot.
> Maybe these notes were for Windows?  That is the only explanation I can
> come up with to explain this.

I went and read which reveals that is a Linux solution. I have observed that 
scanner interfaces are, fragile at best, and I'm not surprised they want to 
reboot with the device turned on.

> Fortunately for me, I don't need this app since I already have a functional ocr solution .
> in Linux.
> My solution involves a few shell commands.  It seems much simpler than this app in any case.

from reading the documentation, this application looks very simple and it is 
aimed at visually impaired users.  if you can use a keyboard, this shouldn't be 
a problem.

As for a few shell commands, that's a reasonably inaccessible especially from 
speech recognition. Shell commands fail accessibility for a couple reasons. 
First the discoverability. You have to know that command exists in order to find 
out what it does unless you happen to remember it. I think I know of about 30 
commands in the shell environment and I need to look at the man pages on 28 of 
them but I do anything more than the basics. Yet there are hundreds of shell 
commands that will probably do what I need except, I don't know they exist and I 
don't know what they do.

The second way they fail is presentation. The name of the command, how it's 
invoked etc. it is not accessible either to speech recognition or 
text-to-speech. The last one, text-to-speech, may do a more credible job at 
presenting garbled text (command names, commandline arguments etc.) than speech 
recognition will when generating the same.

You are correct however that once you have a CLI idiom memorized it does become 
easier to use because you associate a concept with a more complicated structure 
and then just use the concept as shorthand for that structure.

--- eric