Fruitbox

The new Ubuntu has just been released, so I decided to upgrade to it, and I also updated Orca and Firefox to a development releast of 3.0 (this works with Orca!)
I have not been able to get full-screen magnification working properly yet, but I am truly impressed with the other features of Orca. The new eSpeak synthesizer is just so much more responsive and easier to listen to as well in my opinion. An additional bonus is that is supports many languages.
Orca is also now doing a good job together with the upcoming Firefox 3. I logged in to the Ubuntu forums and posted a note without any problems.
One thing eSpeak needs to get better at is the way it handles a situation in which you press delete multiple times. At this point that is still very slow.
Overall all this is going in the right direction, and at quite a pace too!

So I finally installed Edgy for real, multibooting. Orca is the thing that works best, indeed, it works out quite well I have to say! I for one is in need of full-screen magnification though, and that isn’t as easy to set up and use yet, but it will be in the near future I am pretty sure. Overall it’s the best GNU/Linux distribution I’ve ever tried, but, some dialog boxes in GNOME don’t work well at lower screen resolutions, and that is really bad, and should be quite easy to fix. Right now you have to use something larger than 800x600 or else you will have a bit of trouble. Needless to say I use 800x600 because I need it…
I wish I had more time to really get into this stuff and be able to actually do something useful instead of just complaining, but I don’t find that time anywhere, sadly enough.

Idag kl. 12:00 (GMT=10:00) har Ubuntu Accessibility Team möte i vanlig ordning i #ubuntu-meeting på FreeNode-nätverket. Jag är registrerad medlem men har inte haft möjlighet att hjälpa till så mycket än, men jag tänker vara med på detta möte och hoppas det ger något. Jag har en föreläsning nu men tackvare att vi har sommartid (GMT+2) så hinner jag vara med på mötet!

INTRODUCTION
This text is aimed at clarifying the status of current accessibility in Linux. What tools are they and how well do they work? Do note that this article leans towards visual impairment, because that is what I have, and the applications I mainly tested lie in that field.

SYNOPSIS
Using VMWare Player on Windows (see SYSTEM SETUP) I managed to install and configure Ubuntu, install the Gnopernicus screen magnifier, and set it up to use full-screen magnification. And the result is quite pleasing at this stage I have to say, allthough everything is a bit snappy mostly due to the fact that I’m running a virtual machine. All in all Linux accessibility has gone a long way, and still has a long way to go. The current status is almost sufficient for me to be able to work in a Linux-based environment.

SYSTEM SETUP
The system is basically a 2.4 GHz Pentium 4 with 512 MB RAM, an ATI Radeon 9600XT videocard and an Abit VT7 mainboard. I’m running Windows XP Professional and on top of that VMWare Player and Ubuntu Linux 6.06 “Dapper Drake”.

INSTALLATIONS AND CONFIGURATIONS
After having installed the basic system along with my favourite packages, and set up the desktop, it was time to install Gnopernicus, which turned out to be very easy. Enabling the accessibility support in GNOME and then starting the magnifier worked flawlessly. Now came the tricky point: to configure xorg.conf to have a virtual screen. This can be automated, and I guess there soon will be a script to do all this for us, but for now I had to do it by hand.
All done and I now have a snappy full-screen magnifier that “sort of works”.

RESULTS
As I stated earlier this setup works out quite nicely. The only permanent bug I got afterwards is that the gnome-panel crashes sometimes. I haven’t looked further into that yet. There could be a solution out there allready. For more information be sure to check out the Ubuntu Accessibility Forums and the Ubuntu Accessibility Wiki, where Jason Grieves has written an excellent guide on how to get all this working.