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Screen Readers for GNOME and KDE?
mingthemerciless asks: "The company I work for is developing accessible solutions for the visually impaired. Right now we are working on (yet another?)a screen reader for windows, but a linux version is on the drawing board...Linux screen readers like Speakup and Emacspeak either are console only or create virtual desktops. Is it viable to have a 'what you hear is what is on the screen' screenreader like JAWS on the current Linux desktop environments Like GNOME 2.0 or KDE 3.0?"
that is here:
a kup
Send Speakup mailing list submissions to
speakup@braille.uwo.ca
To subscribe or unsubscribe via the World Wide Web, visit http://speech.braille.uwo.ca/mailman/listinfo/spe
or, via email, send a message with subject or body 'help' to
speakup-request@braille.uwo.ca
They know what theyre writing about. They have a great linux knowledge. And also a great friendliness toward users, wether newbies or experienced. You will find a lot more insightfull comments about such a subject over there.
I'm not exactly well versed in this subject, but GNOME2 has the ATK (Accessible Toolkit), as well as the GAP (Gnome Accessiblity Project). I'm not sure if screenreader's exist, but the accessiblity project would be a good place to start looking.
:-)
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Sun won the Helen Keller Achievement Award in Technology this year from American Foundation for the Blind for their work in GNOME, so I'm sure they are doing something right
In KDE, unfortunatly, doesn't have that involved accessiblity support (yet). There probably won't be much without a real accessiblity toolkit support (either in Qt or in top of it). Check the kde-accessiblity mailing list if anyone is working on it, but last time I checked, nobody was. The accessiblity.kde.org page seems to be down
The Gnome project seems to be doing a good job for the blind. See the Gnome Accessibility project and specifically Gnopernicus.
Searches for KDE stuff only turned up the KDE Accessibility mailing list. Supposedly the new version of Qt (and by extention, KDE) has a good accessibility framework, but some more digging would be required to find out just what applications (if any) use it.
The CLI is far more efficient for blind users. Particularly those with hearing loss. Learning the one system (a Braille TTY) allows the blind person to read, and insures it won't have to be learned at a later date if the hearing should go. The first point isn't specious; there are studies showing that text to speech 'solutions' are leading to a lack of reading ability amongst the blind. They more or less prove that listening to a book on tape is not the same as reading it, whether in type or in Braille.
All that said, I wish you luck. And let me add a caveat: good luck getting the project adopted. In my experience, government agencies aren't interested in anything but Windows. Whatever you come up with will have to be able to be set up by the end user or some helpful geek.
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
There are certainly times when one would want a non-CLI interface even if one were blind - for example, when using programs that are not (and should not) be for the console, such as word processors. Same for come web browsers - to the best of my knowledge, there is not and probably will never be a console web browser that supports major plugins or Java.
Besides, the trend is for allmost all applications, even on linux, to end up being for a window system. The trend is going to keep moving in that direction.
What is a blind person going to get from macromedia (The majorest plugin?) or even java? And what is wrong with an old console based wordprossessor (Like an old DOS one). I doubt that a blind person would benifit too much from higher level formatting. If I turn off images in a web browser and read the text, it is no different to me then using links and reading the text.
I will agree with the comment someone made about the braile console output, I would imagine it is much quicker then listining to a voice.
So really it comes down to your last point, which is the kicker. If a blind person is going to interoperate with word 2006 they probably better be able to use abiword, or star office, or office. And not starwrite.
Really what blind people need (in my probably totally wrong opinion, I am not blind, nor do I know anyone who is) is a good remake of a console word prossessor, with some type of MS word importing and exporting functionality. A web browser that can play sound files but is console based and other console based apps with key binding for menues.
All these apps could be in there own virtual terminal and would really be indistinguishable from a window environment if you couldn't see where they were. If the project was done well, people of less means could also use it to get modern compatibility in their wordprossessing.
Also, console does not automatically mean CLI. dpkg-configure has a very nice diolog box interface, as did the old word prossessors.
(shame on me not looking up prossessor)
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
to see that being blind is, indeed, a quite expensive proposition. JAWS, the screen-reading software mentioned by the submitter, costs US $895. Even the timed evaluation version is $39.95. This sucks; the software needed to access a computer when being blind costs as much as the computer itself, and i'm not even counting a braille keyboard or display.
Blind + Linux = BLINUX
"The purpose of BLINUX project is to improve usability of the LINUX operating system for the user who is blind"
After searching Google for blind linux, I found BLINUX as the first result, I'm surprised no one has suggested it yet. There's probably everything one should know trying to set up a Linux box for blind users.
As for the text mode vs. GUI, let me quote BLINUX FAQ, emphasis is mine:
This is basically what I thought, but I searched the FAQ to make sure how the most interested people feel about it.
root@aio:~# nmap -sX -iR -p1- # Ho, ho, ho! Merry Xmas, everyone!
You mean the WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) word processors? (I hope it's not some stupid joke.) "The best output a blind person using WYSIWYG software can hope for is getting no output at all" as the anonymous geek quoted on BLinux FAQ has said. There are typesetting (or "word processing") tools working perfectly well in any text editor you have. I personally use Donald Knuth's TeX and Leslie Lamport's LaTeX extention because they are more powerful than any WYSIWYG tool I've ever used (including TeXmacs), while also giving me much better looking results. They're not only more powerful for people with good sight like myself, they can also be used from any text editor a blind person can use, like the Emacspeak for example. That's if a blind person ever needs such a tool, like for writing a book or printed article. Because using word processors for communication (like most of people use Microsoft Word these days) instead of plain text email is stupid at least.
root@aio:~# nmap -sX -iR -p1- # Ho, ho, ho! Merry Xmas, everyone!
Proklam is a speech architecture for KDE. It is still under development and I have no idea what the progress is, but you can find it in the kdenonbeta CVS module (instructions) of the project.
"Proklam is a desktop service that will allow KDE applications (and other applications) to use speech synthetisers using a dcop interface."
The README file of the project has contact information, in case you'd like to get in touch with the developer.
For the sighted, there are major gains to be realized from GUI apps. But you do trade off functionality.
.wav files and whatnot. It's not unlike choosing helper apps for Mozilla and others. Like I said, I'm a fan of WP5.2. Think we still have a copy around here. Will probably try to run it from one of the command line DOS emulators for Linux.
Even before losing her eyesight, my wife preferred text terminals to GUIs. She almost had a conniption when her Dos 6.2 partition died on her computer. The total upside is that she doesn't need to 'unlearn' the GUI tools.
If the parent poster is still reading, I always liked WordPerfect for DOS. With a multi-line braille terminal, you can have an editing line and a status line. What more do you need? Sounds like a perfect environment for VIM.
Nobody has discussed the privacy factor either. Perhaps my wife (or some random blind person) doesn't want the world to know she is browsing the Barney website (or whatever she browses). Text-to-speech prevents that. Hell, with a Braille TTY, I can't even look over her shoulder and see what she's doing. (Upside is she can't look over my shoulder and see me looking at pr0n).
I think you are on the mark in what you suggest for blind people. I believe links, lynx, w3m, and a few others support the functionality you mention. All you have to do is assign some sound player to handle
On the last thing: I'm no zealot. I'm typing this from a Win2k machine. But the command line for Linux is far superior to that in any current version of DOS/Windows.
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon