Unity-3D and accessibility

[Robert Cole]

I would strongly second Alan's suggestion of using Compiz under Unity 
2D. This is actually what I do when I want and need to use 
magnification, and it works quite well. I have had little if any 
problems with this at all. The Negative plugin works as well. Also, if 
you get frustrated with the launcher popping up when you are reading 
things which are close to the left of the screen, you can right-click on 
your desktop, select Change Desktop Background, go to the Behavior tab 
in the window which appears, turn on the option labelled Auto-hide the 
Launcher, and set the option for Reveal location to "Top left corner". 
This will make it much more comfortable and hassle free when it comes to 
panning and reading documents.

I hope that this is helpful to you.

Take care.

On 05/04/2012 12:33 PM, Alan Bell wrote:
> On 04/05/12 16:39, Nadine Ledwig wrote:
>> Hello,
>>
>> I'm highly sight impaired,  and the last two years, I was used to  
>> use ubuntu 10.4 with orca and the compiz plugins eZoom-Desktop  and 
>> negativeplugin.
>>
>> Now, i installed ubuntu 12.04 on my desktop and I've some problems.
>> In unity-2d, dash and louncher works well, but i can not  zoom and 
>> invert colors.  Without that two features,  it is hard to use my 
>> computer for me.
>> In unity-3d, i configured that two plugins and it works well. But, 
>> dash, louncher, and the alt+tab task switcher  are not spoken by orca 
>> and not zoomed. That means, they are nearly unusable  for me.
>> I can only open the dash, starting to type and press enter, and hope 
>> the right application will start.
>>
>> Is there an aditional package to make unity-3d accessible for orca? 
>> Or is it possible to use unity-2d in conjunction with compiz?
>>
>>
>>
>> Hope for help,
>> Nadine
>>
>>
> unity3d is somewhat accessible with orca, but as you note the dash and 
> some other stuff isn't really working. Zooming doesn't work on the 
> panel and launcher (except for the badly implemented and annoying top 
> bar shadow . . .) because that is all drawn through the nux toolkit 
> which is unaffected by any compiz transforms. I know this is really 
> bad for a huge number of people with mild to moderate vision issues 
> (almost certainly our largest group of users of assistive tools - 
> basically anyone who might wear glasses and enjoy the large print 
> section of the local library) and I will be raising this at the Ubuntu 
> Developer summit next week.
>
> unity2d with compiz might be a better strategy, and in fact unity2d 
> with the Wayland compositor might be the real way forward, I have been 
> talking to the wayland developers about accessibility including orca 
> and zoom and text cursor tracking zoom and colour filters, it is 
> important to get this stuff in as early as possible and designed in, 
> rather than tacked on afterwards. With features like the HUD landing 
> broken and the global menus all being checkbox menu items until we got 
> the hint set right and the shortcut overlay being totally inaccessible 
> it is clear that accessibility isn't being designed in early enough to 
> new features and this is creating more unbudgeted work as people try 
> to fix the broken stuff that was never designed to be accessible.
>
> Alan.
>