If your monitor is turned off, how do you know what app you're using, what you're typing, which button you've selected and the contents of the email you've just received? You' going to need audio feedback.

This is where Orca which is the screenreader interface for Gnome Desktops comes in. It will read the titles of your applications, echo characters and sentences you've typed, read out dialogs and even tell you the checked/unchecked status or check boxes. Turn of you monitor and you will quickly get a feel of how accessible an application really is.

Orca is part of Gnome, so there is no need to install it. You will however need to install the text to speech backend. You have two choices, espeak or festival and I chose the latter for FreeBSD.

Ports you need:

• audio/festival
• audio/festvox-* (voice) I chose audio/festvox-us1-mbrola (female american)
• audio/festlex-poslex (lexicon)

I had a slight issue with the audio/mbrola port, cut had issues with some accented characters in voices.conf. Just delete them, or replace the characters and it will build fine.

That's it, after that just start Orca, you will get a small dialog from which you can edit preferences such as voice, echo, verbosity.

After some tweaking, I managed to be able to edit, load and save text files with gedit with the monitor turned off. To use other applications though like email and browsers, requires a bit more familarity with a range of keyboard shortcuts you need to navigate between panels/frames of the application. Not all applications are accessibility compliant, and even with visual cues, you will quickly get a feel of how difficult it is for applications that are badly designed.

One example is appreciating the fact that Gnome userbility guides says that there should not be any OK and Cancel buttons. This makes using things like Gedit so much easier, as you can hear "Save Without Saving button" being read out. You could get it to read the dialog explanation, but you don't need to. Using the file dialog, I realised that using Desktop and having it read out all the folders and files was a lot easier for navigation. Quite good, it would read out "IOSN Final Report - OpenOffice document" even if the file name was "IOSN Final Report.odt".

I'm going to have a futher go at this over the weekend, and see if I can get a list of friendly apps as well as get used to all the shortcuts that I normally don't use. If you're already used to using keyboard shortcuts, the learning curve will be much simpler. I know I had an easy time with Evolution, lauching apps (alt-f2) and accessing the desktop (ctrl-d and then arrow keys). If you've never used keyboard shortcuts, you will find navigation quite tough (remember you can't see anything, a shortcut is immediate, vs having Orca read out every single submenu).

The computer voice I'm using could do with improvements for prounciation (you can train/replace this through Orca preferences), but overall I could navigate and understand what it was reading quite well. I just need to test further the best apps and usage for common tasks of emails browsing and communication (pidgin/irc).

If you're interested in joining the upcoming workshop to help visually disabled users use IT with FOSS applications, please email me at kaeru@inigo-tech.com. Also visit the event page for more details:

http://foss.org.my/projects/community-projects/iosn-accessibility-rtd