[laptop-accessibility] How can the XO be made accessible to blind

[Duane King]

On Monday 07 January 2008 05:55:10 pm Albert Cahalan wrote:
> > We would want to have a speech-server to help make activities
> > self-voicing for the xo, and also have the possibility of future use for
> > already developed Gnome accessibility tools.
> > speech-dispatcher is being suggested to be made compatible with dbus. (by
> > duane)
I never said to add dbus support to speech-sdispatcher; I was saying lets 
throw out dbus and use sockets.

> > The xo will be used by many young students. The idea is to show the code
> > "under the hood" by a simple click of a button to the student and allow
> > them to modify the activity within seconds to do something new. With such
> > a requirement imposed upon us, we should try to ensure to keep the code
> > as simple and free of any technical concepts like TCP sockets for
> > connections as far as possible.

I agree with Albert; Our goal is to educate the children of the world, not 
obscure the complexity of it from them like a bad parent who tries to protect 
them from it by ignoring them as they sit in front of the TV all day.

> > Is it easy to envision a simple dbus like api (that we have right now)
> > for the speech-server? If it can reduce the complexity of the python
> > client programming example then I think I would love to explore the
> > option of
>
> This massively increases the total complexity, making the system
> as a whole become rather opaque.
>
> If I do "view source" on the Terminal activity, do I get to see any code
> that interprets the escape sequences and control characters? Can I
> somehow navigate to the font rendering code? If not, then "view source"
> is a total joke. You can't get to the meat of anything. All you can do is
> look at the fluff, the wrappers, the glue. That stuff is trivial and
> worthless.

I have thought this as well.

> > We need to make the GNOME accessibility framework work on OLPC/Sugar,
No, we dont.  It is too bloated, and I also feel that its somewhat ironic that 
gnome was created by people whoes biggest reason for not simply using what 
worked before seems to be big on the use of shiny graphics "for the users",  
who by that alone could never understand the needs of the blind.  The fact is 
most people by the virtue of them being able to see, do not know and could 
never know what the needs of the blind really are.  They may be well 
intentioned - and I deeply thank them for that, I really do - but in the end 
they do not know the needs of the blind, and the sort of systems created for 
the average donated desktop where deffinatably not created for a stripped 
down system like the XO anyway.

Just like everything else moved to the XO, feature creep and bloat need to be 
expunged from the accessability systems.  This is a hard fact, and no matter 
what you want to say the prioritiy should be:

A.) Use Of The Laptop through Blind Accessability
B.) Use of as small of amount of power, memory, and cpu cycles doing so as 
possible.

> > in 
> > order to support assistive technologies (right now we have ATK, but
> > AT-SPI depends upon CORBA and Bonobo which are presently too big to fit
> > comfortable in the OLPC hardware envelope). This might mean putting the
> > existing AT-SPI infrastructure on a major diet, or it might mean moving
> > to something like DBUS (which is attractive for other reasons)

Give me a socket and a pointer for my data buiffer.  Thats all we need. My 
personal end goal is that somebody can use a OLPC device without needing to 
look at the screen at all. In fact, the screen should be powered off to 
conserve power in this state, and any system that is only used for the GUI 
should be unloaded from memory to make more room available for the audio 
interface libs.

> You care about performance? D-BUS is thus disqualified.
Actualy, Sugar is disqualified. We should be able to turn it off as part of 
the accessability goals, as a GUI system taking up valuable battery power and 
cpu cycles has no use to somebody who can only hear the sounds the XO makes.

- Duane King