From: Antony Stone <Antony.Stone_at_rockbox.open.source.it>
Date: Sun, 25 May 2008 12:02:26 +0100

On Sunday 25 May 2008 11:18, Dominik Riebeling wrote:

> On Sun, May 25, 2008 at 1:16 AM, Daniel Dalton <d.dalton_at_iinet.net.au>
wrote:
>
> > No, accessibility on linux is very good with gtk, and the command line! I
> > use the cmd line all the time for most tasks.
>
> Well, I never understood why a blind guy would want to use a
> GUI-centric OS like windows anyway

That's simple - what platform is the majority of software produced for, and if
that's GUI-based, what platform has a working screenreader?

Blind users don't _want_ to use Windows - they want to use applications - but
they have to accept the platform those applications are accessible to them on
(which means the apps run, and a screenreader works).

Even using the web for a blind user is near impossible under Linux - there's
no command-line browser which supports javascript, and no out-of-the box
distro which includes a working screenreader (Gnopernicus is dead, and a
working Orca hasn't made it into most distros - with the possible exception
of the latest Knoppix, which I'm currently evaluating).

> -- it's much easier to extract the text from the command line as it isn't
> rendered to graphics and you don't make heavy use of windows, isn't it?

Show us a command-line browser which works with modern websites, and plenty of
blind users will happily abandon the GUI :)

> > So if you had decided to use gtk, they would be accessible, but I guess
> > it wouldn't be as cross-platform?
>
> The old version of rbutil used wxwidgets. This uses GTK on linux, but
> it's a pain for deployment -- we weren't able to provide a linux
> binary at all. On windows it uses native widgets (IIRC), but so does
> Qt. Using native Gtk would've made deployment on windows a bigger
> hassle. Also, I'm not sure about accessibility of Gtk on windows. At
> least the switch to Qt was made due to pragmatic reasons -- easier
> deployment is one of them, another one is that more developers are
> familiar with Qt. As far as I can tell that switch gave quite some
> development boost. Plus, it looks much nicer IMO ;-)

I'm not quite sure what the above paragraph means in terms of future
accessibility - does it mean that the toolkit chosen for rbutil doesn't work
with current Linux screenreaders, or just that you have to have the right
libraries etc installed in order to use it?

I know of no other screenreader under active development than Orca, and it's
easy for a sighted user to find out whether things work or not - either by
using the speech synthesiser, or by using Brltty with the text window driver
(so you see one line of text in a window, just as a blind user would see one
line of Braille on a refreshable display).


Antony.

-- 
"640 kilobytes (of RAM) should be enough for anybody."
 - Bill Gates
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Received on 2008-05-25