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

Doesn't currently work out of the box, needs some patches.

http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-gnome/2007-November/018614.html

Will probably have a PR submitted next week for the port, kagesenshi reports that it's in Fedora already. We will try to get into a habit of submitting to upstream as soon as possible for anything we work with.

The P133 is definitely a trip down memory lane. Anybody remember S3? The card has a whopping 2MB of memory that gives us 1024x768x16K colours. Amazing how far things have come since then. Not entirely practical, but it proves the point that even with this old hardware, you can still get work done if you have an XDMCP server setup at your workplace.

Meetup

Don't forget that the MyOSS meetup is tonight at the usual place and time, except it's today, a Wednesday. Simon Phipps of Sun is presenting so if you wanted to know more about their open source projects like OpenSolaris, OpenJDK etc and how you can participate, don't miss it.

MyGOSSCon

We're at Booth B5 Thursday and Friday. Feel free to hang out with us there, we're not marketing droids. I was thinking that some bean bags would be great to have there. Me and Kagesenshi will sit around barefoot like CmdrTaco. Though I don't think MAMPU would allow us to do that.

Feeling lethargic past few days, but managed to clear a few urgent things this morning. Change can be a good thing sometimes, and in going with the dark theme thread at Planet Gnome, I also opted for look and feel change on my desktop.

So here's my new desktop:

Theme is a slightly modified Darkilouche

Icon theme is the nice Tango icons that everybody is using these days.

Just upgraded my desktop to the recently released Gnome 2.20. It continues with the gradual improvement and polish throughout the Gnome Desktop environment. Speed up here and there, more efficient power management, various UI and dialog tweaks etc. An example is that instead of one huge list of tasks and appointments, from the clock applet, you now have little arrows for tasks and appointments which collapses. Similarly the new Clearlooks theme has blue scrollbars which makes it stand out more. Seems like a minor point, but it's all the small little things that give it that polished look and feel.

Official release notes

Desktop

Shift Switcher

All my workspaces on a Wall