My observations on 11.10's accessibility

[Jacob Schmude]

Hi
That's what I was wondering. I know I can install gdm and switch to it, 
but I was curious if there was another way. It's not that big of an 
issue, having the login screen talk is more a factor of convenience than 
necessity. When you say it seems to be the packages themselves, do you 
mean that Thunderbird and Firefox themselves have this problem as 
released from Mozilla, or just the Ubuntu builds?


On 10/20/2011 00:51, Rob Whyte wrote:
> Hi Jacob,
>
> I can confirm that the thunderbird crashing when you delete mail and 
> firefox frame issue are present.
>
> It how ever is not just on oneiric, it seems to be the packages 
> themselves.
> To my knowledge orca does not currently work with the login screen, if 
> its an issue for you perhaps you could install gdm?
>
> Good luck
> Rob Whyte
>
>
> On 10/20/2011 06:12 PM, Jacob Schmude wrote:
>> Hi all,
>> Well, after a bit of playing around, I did get Ubuntu Oneiric to
>> install. On my machine, I had to press ctrl+s regularly throughout the
>> boot-up process. This was the only way I got the drums to play,
>> otherwise, it would go straight to the Unity-3D environment without
>> giving me the chance to enable the accessible installer. The machine, if
>> it makes a difference, is a Samsung NF310 netbook. After playing with it
>> for most of the day, I've some observations, both positive and negative,
>> that I'd like to note.
>> First off, let me say that I've enabled the proposed updates repository
>> and updated before I started using Oneiric.
>>
>> ** Desktop environment
>> 1. The toggle screen reader key is not enabled by default. I really
>> believe this should be set, if not globally, than at least when an
>> accessible install is done. There seems to be no way to reliably force
>> Orca to load on login, so setting such a shortcut would be of great 
>> help.
>> 2. Many menu items in the application menu (the new global Unity menu
>> bar) read as check items when they are not, and those that are often
>> incorrectly report their status. Also, the top menu bar items read as
>> "label" rather than as a menu item. The check item issue is, imho, more
>> important than the misreading of the label role, as it sometimes reports
>> incorrect status. This bug bleeds over into all applications that
>> integrate with the global menu bar.
>> 3. The QT support works very well. An excellent job on that one, this is
>> a landmark in accessibility for us.
>> 4. Some status menu items, such as the battery, read as simply "image."
>> Does anyone have a reliable way to check the battery status without
>> going into a terminal, since this icon doesn't read?
>> 5. Privilege escalation is working properly. Excellent.
>>
>> ** Mozilla (Firefox and Thunderbird)
>> 1. Internal frames on some web pages seem to cause Orca to say "grayed"
>> until you arrow past them. This makes reading of these frames difficult
>> and, if one is not careful, tabbing around too quickly in these areas
>> will cause Firefox to lock up. Anyone else see this?
>> 2. Firefox's pop-up messages, such as that when you install a new add-on
>> and need to restart, seem to cause a complete inability to move focus
>> via the keyboard save for using Orca's mouse click features. This
>> doesn't seem to happen all the time, and I've not found a pattern to it.
>> This seems to be a new problem, as I don't recall having this issue when
>> using Firefox with Orca in GNOME 2.
>> 3. Thunderbird seems to be remarkably unstable. It's responsive when it
>> works, but often when deleting messages it will crash on me without 
>> warning.
>> 4. Both mozilla products are more responsive than they were in GNOME 2,
>> a huge positive.
>>
>> ** Others
>> 1. What happened to Orca's ability to automatically read Empathy? Not
>> only are the chat features to read prior messages and automatically
>> speak incoming messages absent, but the contact list doesn't read
>> properly once I arrow down past the first three items or so. The focus
>> moves, but Orca doesn't say anything. Arrowing up back to the first
>> three items will cause them to speak, but nothing I do will get the
>> items below it to read when this happens. I've not found a pattern to it
>> but, when it does, a restart of Empathy is needed before the contact
>> list will read again. I'd rather not have to use Pidgin, but I might
>> need to do so until this gets fixed.
>> 2. Is there a way to get Orca to come up at the login screen without
>> having to switch display managers?
>> 3. What are the lenses in the dash supposed to do? When I switch between
>> them, Orca doesn't say anything and nothing different seems to appear.
>> The dash looks and behaves the same no matter what lense I seem to have
>> selected.
>>
>> That's all for now. Anyone confirm some of these issues? A great job
>> over all, and congrats to the Ubuntu devs for this. We're not quite
>> there yet, but I'd say we're closer to having a fully accessible Linux
>> desktop than we've ever been before, and another version or two might
>> just put Ubuntu up there with OS X for built-in access.
>>
>> Thanks
>>
>>
>>
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