Lubuntu and Accessibility

[Luke Yelavich]

On Tue, May 24, 2011 at 09:58:58AM EST, Phill Whiteside wrote:
> >From a general chat to our head of development on lubuntu, he is of the
> opinion that if the code is really (and I mean really) tight, that it would
> be possible to include within the very tight constraints that we are
> committed to be able to uphold the inclusion of accessibility and has agreed
> that we should really strive to attain this.

The first thing is making sure LXDE is actually accessible, i.e make sure it has keyboard shortcuts, and supports the launching of the accessibility framework at startup etc. As to using the LXDE GUI with Orca etc, I think the biggest problem here is the use of python. The components of the stack written in c should be performant enough to work, and if they're not, then I am sure upstream would be willing to help try and optimize them a little more, but Orca being python is unfortunately a rather big blocker for this environment. I remember running Orca on a dual Celeron 466 a few years back in GNOME, and it was rather laggy in performance, I.e a quarter to half a second would go by before I got speech feedback from my action.

So while I think the goals of getting Lubuntu more accessible are noble, I am not sure it will be possible for it to be doable with acceptable accessibility performance for users. I am not saying don't try, but unless Orca or another screen reader was developed in c, then using orca on LXDE is likely to be somewhat painful.

Luke