speakup desktop again

[Michael Whapples]

While your idea is an interesting one, I feel that interfacing between X and 
something such as emacs is not the way to go. As previously pointed out, 
emacspeak has a steep learning curve, and some prefer a GUI (I think each 
type of environment has its place, I use a mixture of GUI and command line 
apps, and choose the most appropriate to what I am trying to achieve).

I feel the problems in developing the gnome screen readers such as orca and 
lsr are not the braille and speech output, but rather in their interfacing 
to the GUI. As an example, orca uses brltty for the braille output which 
handles all the braille display stuff, and orca only needs to concern itself 
with how that should be presented to brltty for display and gather the 
braille keypresses. Both of those parts would be needed to be done when 
interfacing with emacspeak buffers, so I don't get what the gain is. Another 
thing I like about having the GUI available, is most sighted users (computer 
users in general, although I feel it is increasing on Linux) are used to a 
GUI, so if I get stuck or working with someone with a computer running 
linux, then they are more likely to understand what is there (or at least 
not get put off by the unconventional (compared to the norm) interface). I 
also question if there would be any (or how much) of a performance gain 
would be got in doing it this way, as certain parts, if not a full session, 
of the X system would need to be loaded for the apps to work.

If that seems a bit negative, its I feel that you would have alot of work to 
do such a project, and the results may not be better than what exists. The 
one thing I would say may be good to try is to interface with firefox 
directly, as web browsing is something you say is lacking, rather than 
trying to interface with the entire of gnome, which would duplicate some of 
what you have in emacs, and the work that is already being done. I believe 
in not needing to do more work than is needed, may be you differ on this.

From
Michael Whapples
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Christopher Moore" <christopher.h.moore at verizon.net>
To: <speakup at braille.uwo.ca>
Sent: Monday, March 26, 2007 4:36 PM
Subject: speakup desktop again


> Hello,
> I saw this topic on the speakup list recently and followed the
> discussion with interest.
>
> I'd classify myself as a happy linux user.  When I was working I more or
> less had to use windows to conform to the culture of my employer.  Even
> if linux alternatives were available, convincing the IT staff that
> accessing their network with "non-standard" software would somehow
> compromise their security would not have been
> an easy task.  Now that I am retired, I find that the linux text console
> satisfies most of my computer needs except for web browsing.  So I still
> need to boot up the ms windows to access some web pages when I need to
> order something online or listen to audio streams.
>
> While reading this discussion, it occurred to me that we already have a
> text-based desktop environment in the form of emacs.  What emacs lacks
> is an up-to-date web browser.  While I've read comments on the w3
> browser, most of them are not favorable.  What emacs does have, however,
> is buffers and robust editing features.  If, there were a way to say,
> run firefox in a X session and control it from an emacs environment,
> would this not fill the gap?
>
> Let me take this a step further.  We're all aware of the effort to make
> the gnome desktop accessible.  This is a major undertaking and involves
> retooling many applications to use the gtk+ archa tecture to expose
> their contents.  It further involves developing screen readers to
> retrieve this information and speak it in some usable format.  To-date I
> am aware of three such screen readers: gnopernicus, orca and lsr.  Work
> on the first appears to have stopped while work on the latter two is
> still underway.
>
> This brings me back to the emacs environment.  Much of the work on the
> above screen readers centers on developing speech and braille output
> facilities.  Orca for example, has an on-screen dialog for
> modifying speech, braille an magnification parameters.  If the screen
> readers were designed to communicate with emacs, the spoken content
> would appear in an emacs buffer and the applications could be controlled
> from a text console.  If this approach had been taken, all the effort
> put into developing the braille and speech facilities would have been
> unnecessary.
>
> I'm looking for volunteers to investigate the prospect of
> communicating
> with X applications from a console environment.  While it would be nice
> to use the entire gnome desktop, my initial focus would probably on web
> browsing since there is a definite gap in this area.
>
> Feel free to comment on the speakup list or to me directly.  If such a
> group were to be be formed it would probably make sense to start a
> separate mailing list or other vehicle for sharing ideas.
>
> Chris
>
>
>