Accessibility questions

[Joe Marcus Clarke]

On Mon, 2009-09-21 at 00:02 +0200, Peter Laursen wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I have various questions about Gnome and accessibility - I have
> unsuccessfully tried finding these ansers myself. I hope, therefore, that
> someone on this list has the answers.

While I recognize the importance of a11y, I am not knowledgeable on the
topic at all.  I'm not sure if you're going to find all the answers
here.  Speaking for myself, when I was porting apps like orca,
gnome-speech, and dasher, I simply made sure they compiled, and did very
limited run-time testing.  I would certainly welcome an a11y expert to
contribute to FreeBSD GNOME.

> 
> A short background: I am to give a short presentation on Open-source and
> accessibility to some people who counsel blind people in what software
> they need to choose. Currently, their only choice is Windows. FreeBSD has
> shown to be the best platform for Gnome in this respect, especially
> because of its clear and simple setup and crystal-clear audio.
> 
> Here, then, follows the questions:
> 
> 1) On various Linux distributions, an audio file is played when the
> machine is ready for login. Where does one set this up on FreeBSD? In
> gdm.conf or in a completely separate place?

That sound right.  I do know GDM does have some a11y integration points,
but I'm not sure how one would setup a ready-to-login sound.

> 
> 2) When one installs x11/gnome2, gnome-speech is also built. However, due
> to gnome-speech's detecting installed speech synthesizers on build-time,
> it would be wise to include a configuration section in the port makefile,
> allowing a user to choose what speech synthesizer the person would use. I
> would like to help with integrating this change if possible. I realise
> that few people would need this.

Sure, patches are welcome.  If you can create something you feel
comfortable with, I'd be happy to commit your work.

> 
> 3) When one builds Gnome from ports, Firefox 3 is unable to communicate
> with the Gnome screen reader. If one chooses the Gnome that is built from
> packages (e.g. pkg_add -r gnome2) and then runs portupgrade -a and
> installs Firefox 3, Firefox 3 and Orca are able to communicate, meaning
> that visually impaired people are able to browse the net from FreeBSD.
> What Gecko engine is used when Gnome is built for distribution with the
> various FreeBSD versions?

Up until very recently, GNOME components used www/firefox (i.e. FF 2.0)
for Gecko.  Now they use libxul (i.e. the same Gecko version used by FF
3.0.x).  In GNOME 2.28, epiphany will use WebKit, but yelp will still be
libxul-based.

Hearing that the ports FF 3.0 doesn't work with orca while the package
version does is very confusing.  If anything, I'd expect the opposite.
You might try resyncing the ports tree, then remove www/firefox, run
portupgrade -a to upgrade ports like yelp and ephy, then rebuild
firefox3.

Joe

> 
> My own test machine uses FreeBSD 8.0 Beta 4. It's an I386-install of FreeBSD.
> 
> I look forward to hearing from anyone who may have some of the answers to
> the above questions.
> 
> Regards,
> 
> Peter.
> 
> 
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