For the case you, dear reader, are not subscribed to the KDE-accessibility mailinglist (tststs), we received a rather interesting mail just yesterday; Project Announce: AT-SPI D-Bus
That project is done by codethink and sponsored by Nokia and Mozilla (and Novell seems to be in there somehow too). Result will be (hopefully) also that each Qt- and KDE-application will be able to access optional the same accessibility-infrastructure like e.g. GNOME is using today. For this Qt4 provides the Qt Accessibility framework and the best; no additional work at the application-level is needed (well, with some exceptions as usual).
Yay, another good day 
p.s. what's going on with freedesktop.org? Why does it take 6 month to provide an svn-account for that project and akonadi still waits for one since more then a year now iirc. Not enough admins or are the accounts managed using Active Directory?
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The Daily WTF
has an
interesting post
today.
A company had to relocate from the second to the first floor in
their building. Unfortunately their server room couldn't be moved.
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Here's the letter from building management explaining the situation:
Hi all.
As you all are aware, we have new tenants that have moved into
the 2nd floor suites. The access to the server room is now via
the women?s bathroom.
There will be a sign on the woman?s door that can be changed
from OPEN to CLOSED and vice versa.
Should you need to enter the server room, please change the sign
to CLOSED. Once you are done, please change it back to OPEN.
Once you enter the bathroom, you will be able to access the
server room via the handicapped stall. Please close the stall
door prior to entry, just in case someone doesn?t see that the
bathroom is closed.
I know this isn?t ideal, but if we adhere to this protocol, I
don?t think anyone will be disrupted.
Thanks! Let me know if you have any questions.
I have one. Do the
AAPD know about this?
If they don't, they will soon.
[Technorati Tag: WTF]
[Technorati Tag: Accessibility]
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I got an
Eee PC for my birthday; one of those with 1GB on memory
and 8GB of "solid state" disk. I played around with the kiosk-mode
Linux that came with it. I know you can fairly easily get out of
that mode, but as I really didn't want to learn yet another
version of Linux, I decided to install Ubuntu Hardy on it.
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I upgraded my previous created
Ubuntu Gutsy bootable thumb drive
to contain Hardy.
These instructions
helped out (thanks Ryan). I did the:
$ sudo lilo -M /dev/sdd
at the end just to be safe.
There's still some problems:
- Battery Monitor: "Battery may be broken: Your battery has a
very low capacity (1%) which ..."
- Wireless connection not working.
- Microphone not working.
- SD card reader not working.
- Webcam not working.
but I'll leave them for another day. Hopefully
this page
should be a great help in fixing some of them.
For now, I've just hooked up the Eee to an external monitor, USB keyboard
and mouse. I'm using a wired network connection and I've plugged in a nice
set of speakers. I've also installed all the updates from the network
repositories to get this up to GNOME 2.22.2.
I followed the
Orca setup instructions
and installed the nice
Cepstral Callie voice,
and voila! I have Orca running on yet another computer.
The potential here is that it's running on such a nice small portable
machine though.
[Technorati Tag: Eee PC]
[Technorati Tag: Ubuntu]
[Technorati Tag: Orca]
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One of the things I like about working on
Orca, is the challenge of
trying to make a poorly designed application
accessible to blind people.
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Here's
the bug. The GNOME lock screen application has started on the user's desktop.
When they press any key, it invites them to type in a password. If they type
in their password incorrectly, they will first see some text appearing in
a label under the password text area saying "Checking...".
Then this is replaced with some more text saying "Incorrect password."
It then wiggles the dialog box from side to side a couple of times, then
removes that text. It also clears out the password text area.
I mean, even if you are a sighted person and you'd wandered away from the
screen for a few seconds, it's distinctly possible that you wouldn't have
seen these messages and have any idea what happened.
For a blind person it's even worst. Nothing is spoken whilst this operation
is happening (i.e. those labels don't get focus). Orca also has this
feature called "flat review", where you can examine the contents of a
window or a dialog component by component and see what their states are.
That's not going to help here because the gnome-screensaver-dialog
designers have decided that that useful information isn't needed
after they've finished jiggling the dialog.
So what can you do? Well, we can write a Python script in Orca specifically
for the gnome-screensaver-dialog application, to try to work around this.
Every time the text caret is moved to (i.e focused in) the password text area, Orca gets an
"object:state-changed:focused" event. This gets passed onto the onStateChanged
callback in the Script class. In our gnome-screensaver-dialog script, we
override the default behavior for that method.
Here's where the fun begins. Several other different types of
"object:state-changed:..." events also arrive here, so we need to check
that it's a "focused" type and the it's for a text area that has a
role of "password text". Luckily there's only one of them in this
application, so we don't need to get any more specific then that.
If it isn't an event we are interested in, we just pass it on to the parent class.
If it's an "object:state-changed:focused" event for the password text
area, we walk back up the accessible component hierarchy for this
dialog and get the parent of the parent of the parent of the object that
had the event (i.e. the password text area). We know that
that object has six children, and two of them are labels. Those are the
ones we are interested in. So we iterate
over the children and if it's a label and it has a name, then we speak
the name. The name in this case will be set to "Checking..." and
"Incorrect password" when those states occur.
It's hardly an exact science. It's yet another hack. This all works
because we get a couple more "object:state-changed:focused" events
at the right time and can extract this other information out. If the dialog
is redesigned, and the hierarchy is no longer the same, then our script
won't work. The real fix here would be to get the gnome-screensaver-dialog
developers to redesign their code so that we didn't have to jump through
hoops, but from past experience we don't always have the success we would like with
this approach.
[Technorati Tag: GNOME]
[Technorati Tag: Accessibility]
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A couple of weeks ago,
Maya, one of the
xDesign folks at Sun, asked me if I'd like to be one of the
contributors to the design @ Sun blog.
In particular, blogging about accessibility related design.
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I accepted. Today was my
first post.
As this is a serious topic oriented
blog, they have a different setup that I do with my own blog. The potential
posts are vetted and then scheduled to appear. It felt weird waiting about
ten days for the post to see the light of day, but I guess I'll get used to it.
[Technorati Tag: Design]
[Technorati Tag: Accessibility]
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I've got an old Dell Dimension 8200 that's setup as a triple boot.
As well as running Windows XP and Ubuntu Hardy, there is a partition
available to install Solaris.
On Wednesday I burnt a copy of the OpenSolaris Developer Preview RC1 Live CD and installed that.
I see that
RC2
is now available. Doh!
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(Serendipitously, the IPS network repository
went live last night.
This helped make life much easier and maybe even alleviates the need to do all of this again with
RC2. Dunno).
Next I needed to download the
Sun Studio 12 compilers. I just downloaded the compressed tarball (about 240 MB's), uncompressed
it (about 950 MB's) and added a couple directories to my PATH and MANPATH.
It sure would be nice if the compilers were packed with a finer granularity.
I really don't want to have almost a gigabyte of stuff lying around if all
I'm needing is a C compiler. Gnu compilers seem to have solved this problem.
Next I downloaded and installed the
JDS CBE.
From chatting with various folks on the #opensolaris IRC channel on
freenode.net, I suspect I didn't need to do this. Anyhoo, I installed the
SUNWhea and SUNWsfwhea package via the IPS network repository, then ran the
CBE install script. I answered no for each of the extra packages it wanted
to install for me, and then pointed it at the Sun Studio 12 C compiler that
I'd just installed. This all seemed to install into /opt/jdsbld just fine.
I added the /opt/jdsbld/bin directory to my PATH.
I then used svn to check out the latest Orca sources from SVN
trunk and tried to run autogen.sh on it. This started to bitch because of
missing pieces, so I ended up installing a few more packages from the IPS
network repository (I don't remember all the names but they were for things
like gnome-common devel, Gnu m4, Perl XML parser).
I was then able to successfully configure, build and install Orca (installing
as root). When I ran Orca, it automatically went into setup mode and
turned accessibility support on. I then logged out and back in again, and was
able to run Orca.
With no speech.
This was because there was no sound. Before I started the operating system
install, I ran the application that checks to see if all your hardware is
supported. This complained that the driver for my sound card was missing.
The sound device is an Ensoniq 5880 AudioPCI. One of the kind folks on
#opensolaris suggested I try installing
OSS.
I then did just that, downloading the Solaris package
and adding it and then rebooting. When it came back,
I ran osstest and everything worked nicely.
I then installed a copy of Fonix DECtalk for Solaris, which I wanted to
use as my text-to-speech engine.
After that, the next step was to check out the latest
gnome-speech code from SVN trunk, and configure, build
and install it. It found the DECtalk driver and when I restarted Orca,
it burst into voice. Woo hoo!
I now have an OpenSolaris Developer Preview development environment for
Orca.
[Technorati Tag: OpenSolaris]
[Technorati Tag: Orca]
[Technorati Tag: OSS]
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Something we've got to be thinking about soon is seeing what needs to
be done to get Orca
to run with
Python 3.0,
which is planned to be available in Auguest 2008.
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So I thought I'd give it a try now with the current
Python 3.0a3
download.
Building it was trivial:
$ cd /home/richb/Python-3.0a3
$ ./configure --prefix=/usr
$ make
$ sudo make install
Guido and team have even made the conversion trivial. There is a tool
called 2to3 in the Tools directory that will do the refactor
for you.
I checked out a clean copy of the Orca sources from SVN and converted it
with:
$ cd /home/richb/Python-3.0a3/Tools/2to3
$ python refactor.py /home/richb/gnome/orca/trunk/src >/tmp/diffs
This generated about 115KB of patch diffs on standard out which I then
applied to the Orca source code:
$ cd /home/richb/gnome/orca/trunk
$ patch -p0 </tmp/diffs
I then configured, built and installed Orca with:
$ cd /home/richb/gnome/orca/trunk
$ ./autogen.sh --prefix=/usr
$ make
$ sudo make install
As it was byte-compiling all the Orca Python modules it bitched about the following
two problems:
orca.py", line 1306
+ Q_("option|main-window") + "]", end=' ')
^
SyntaxError: invalid syntax
orca_prefs.py", line 636
os.close(os.open(initFile, os.O_CREAT, 0o700))
^
SyntaxError: invalid syntax
For the second one, it looks like "0o700" should be "o0700" but I couldn't
work out what was wrong with the first one. The original code was:
print "-e, --enable=["
+ Q_("option|speech") + "|"
+ Q_("option|braille") + "|"
+ Q_("option|braille-monitor") + "|"
+ Q_("option|magnifier") + "|"
+ Q_("option|main-window") + "]",
and it refactored it to:
print("-e, --enable=["
+ Q_("option|speech") + "|"
+ Q_("option|braille") + "|"
+ Q_("option|braille-monitor") + "|"
+ Q_("option|magnifier") + "|"
+ Q_("option|main-window") + "]", end=' ')
According to the
What's New in Python 3.0
web page, that seems okay. For now I've just removed the "end=' '"
part and I have a successful install (with a minor run-time formatting error when
you print out the usage message).
When I run Orca, everything seems to work fine. No tracebacks and Orca is
happy brailling and speaking away.
What worries me is that when I check the version number of
/usr/bin/python (which is the same binary as
/usr/bin/python3.0) I get:
$ /usr/bin/python3.0 --version
Python 2.5.2
So I'm not convinced I've done everything correctly.
Still it was nice to know that the conversion should hopefully be fairly
trouble free when we do it for real. I guess that comes from
pylinting
the code to within an inch of its life.
[Technorati Tag: Orca]
[Technorati Tag: Python]
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Lucas has just
announced
that the
list of tasks
in the GNOME Accessibility Outreach Program
has now been published. If you are interested, consider signing up.
Interesting logo. It made me think of those
Little Green Men
Squeeze Toy Aliens that worship
The Claw in
Toy Story.
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[Technorati Tag: Accessibility]
[Technorati Tag: GNOME]
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All accessibility related ones.
YouTube videos from India on Orca and Open Source Accessibility:
Video #1
Video #2.
See the much more extensive commentary by
Peter and
Will on why this is great.
Congratulations to Krishnakant Mane,
(who is also an Orca community member) for
his leadership in helping to bring free accessible solutions to India.
Unlike Peter, I will comment on the start of the second video, which
is a promotional video by ELCOT.
There was a mail thread a little while ago on an internal bloggers
alias about a post from a Sun employee that made you cringe. Well
the start of this video (and the very end of it) made me cringe,
but for a completely different reason.
GNOME Foundation Announces Program to Sponsor Accessibility Projects
"BOSTON, Mass?February 27, 2008 ? The GNOME Foundation is running an
accessibility outreach program, offering USD$50,000 to be split among
individuals. This program will promote software accessibility awareness
among the GNOME community as well as harden and improve the overall
quality of the GNOME accessibility offering."
Hopefully this will attract quality GNOME individuals. Those
interested should check the project
web site.
(thanks Will).
Is Your Sidewalk Accessible?
You learn something new every day.
(thanks Calvin).
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Due to "high demand", the two March 2008 Linux Journal
articles mentioned in a
previous post are now online.
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(thanks Eitan).
[Technorati Tag: Orca]
[Technorati Tag: Accerciser]
[Technorati Tag: Accessibility]
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Over the last three or four weeks I've been triaging the huge number
of GNOME accessibility bugs that we currently have. You can
find the current list
here.
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It was even longer a month ago. There are several that have been closed out
as they are no longer reproducible and, after a gentle prod, a few others have
been closed as fixed using the patches that were attached to them (or a
slightly modified version thereof).
But there are still a lot that remain. Here's the totals by product:
- orca
- gok
- gnome-themes
- Evolution
- atk
- at-spi gtk+
- nautilus
- gnopernicus
- metacity
- gnome-panel
- gnome-control-center
- epiphany gdm
- gnome-applet gnome-mag gnome-speech
- at-poke xscreensaver
- ekiga tracker vte
- gnome-media gtkhtml2 HIG
- gnome-desktop gnome-games gnome-screensaver GtkHtml
rhythmbox
- balsa dasher f-spot glade3 gnome-main-menu gnome-session
gnome-terminal libgnomecanvas libgnomeui libwnck planner
totem
- accerciser anjuta bug-buddy bugzilla.gnome.org conglomerate
devhelp dia doxygen evince Evolution.Data-Server gcalctool
gconf-editor gdl gftp glade gnome-alsamixer gnome-user-daemon
gnome-utils gnome-vfs gtkmm gucharmap java-gnome libglade
libgnomedb ORBit2 printman sawfish system-monitor Tomboy
xchat-gnome
Here's some notes:
- The bug/enhancement list is generated by looking for bugs which have
a keyword of "accessibility". There will be a lot of accessibility
bugs out there which have omitted this keyword and therefore don't
show up on this list. For example, there are 28 accerciser bugs and
enhancements filed, but only one of them has the requisite keyword.
- The Orca bug/enhancement count is misleading. There are currently 160
bugs/enhancements filed against Orca, but 59 are what we call "tracker"
bugs. This is where we file an Orca bug that tracks another accessibility
bug. The other bug might also be in the GNOME bug tracking database, but
it could also be for other products like OpenOffice or Firefox, which
use their own separate bug tracking systems. The Orca tracking bugs have
"[blocked]" prefixed to their Summaries.
- Some of these accessibility bugs have been open for almost six years.
So, for any GNOME maintainers reading this, I encourage you to try to get
these bugs fixed. We (the accessibility team) quite often see "but I know
nothing about accessibility" as comments on the bug reports. That's okay
(well it isn't really, but let's not go there) and if that's the case,
just let us know (via a comment on the bug) and we'll try to help you.
[Technorati Tag: Accessibility]
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