Ubuntu-accessibility Digest, Vol 54, Issue 23

[Eric S. Johansson]

On 5/23/2010 12:40 PM, Kenny Hitt wrote:
> On Sun, May 23, 2010 at 12:16:12PM -0400, Eric S. Johansson wrote:
>> 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.
>>
> I just switched scanners yesterday with no need to reboot.  That idea about
> scanners doesn't match with my experience in Linux.

fair enough. I don't use scanners except for one and that's under Windows
because I haven't had time to set up on my wife's machine. (Yes, her Facebook
workstation is the house linux box unless you count the mini ITX system running
virtual machines for my firewall and internal print services. Yes, let's not
count that :-)

> Since I'm totally blind, that means I'm likely supposed to be one of the
> users of this product. Since I have years of Linux experience, I don't have
> much confidence in any app that tells me I need to reboot after installing a
> user space app.

really good point. And I'm glad to hear you talk about your experiences. We need 
more user stories to help extract a better than the current model for 
accessibility. This is really great.

> I find I'm still faster and more productive in the text console at a bash
> prompt than I've ever been in a GUI like Gnome.  Gnome has never been stable
> or reliable enough for me to stick with it for more than a few months at a
> time. I had 4 years of Windows experience and was one of the early adopters
> of Gnome accessibility, but Gnome hasn't lived up to it's marketing.

right. That makes sense. What I'm hearing from your experience is that you build 
a mental model of all the commands, you can type them in and get feedback 
through text-to-speech or a braille output device to confirm that you entered 
the right data. The unpronounceable nature of the commandline doesn't bother 
you??? Is that right?

I think the big problem with putting accessibility features for blind users on a 
GUI is that you try to map a two-dimensional shallow but wide user interface 
into an aural format.  similar problem to what we deal with speech recognition.
>
>> 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.
>>
> I don't follow this one.  help $command works for me with a screen reader any
> time I need a reminder of a built in command $command --help works when I
> need a reminder for an external command.

Okay. I was channeling from too deep inside my head on the theory behind 
accessibility. Sorry about that

cp -al [UcWd]* .

How do you pronounce that? In simplest form, its

Charlie papa space minus sign space left bracket cap uniform charlie cap whiskey 
delta close bracket no space asterisk space dot

ugly as hell and rife with potential for speech recognition errors which makes 
it even harder to speak!

If I was to make a little smarter using some macro capability it might be 
something like:

Copy with links source pattern cap uniform charlie cap whiskey delta
close with wildcard
destination there (memorized target location)

little more verbose but, far more resilient against speech recognition errors. 
It's also form one could translate command into for a text-to-speech user. The 
downside with this model is that you need to create special macros for every 
stupid command and work out the appropriate argument handling grammar.

fortunately, I think there's a better way I like to see other ideas if people 
have them.