How can the XO be made accessible to blind

[Hemant Goyal]

Hi,

Thank you for your feedback and inputs.

One question that I have started wondering about now, is how "heavy" orca
would be for the xo? The present speech server that we have written is in my
assumption quite nice, and light weight with features specifically meant for
the xo.

Besides gnome-speech (afaik) does not use dbus. Hence I am wondering, if
orca was ever ported to the xo, how many new dependencies it could create.


> Have you looked at Speech Dispatcher (
> http://www.freebsoft.org/projects/speechd)?  It is supported by Orca
> and seems similar to the speech server you described.  It doesn't
> currently interface with dbus, although it could presumably be made to do
> so.  If you ever have self-voicing activities running on a system which is
> also running Orca, then they should use the same speech server so that they
> are not both trying to talk at the same time.


Absolutely, this is the issue that we want to resolve. When we started
working on the speech server we were not really aware of orca :|. While
self-voicing activities can use our speech-server without any problems, we
might have trouble if someone (even us) ever thinks of porting orca to the
xo. Can someone please share their thoughts about this issue.

Indices should also be supported (espeak and Speech Dispatcher support
> them), since, if a user interrupts speech while reading a document, it is
> good to have the cursor left near the text that was being read before the
> speech was interrupted.


Okay, thanks for the idea. I'll keep this in mind.

Are you intending for this to complement a screen reader such as Orca, or
> are you intending for all activities to be self-voicing?  Or are you still
> in the process of trying to decide that?  What the application should do
> would depend on the api's intended purpose.  There are also situations
> where "auditory icons" will get information across more quickly than spoken
> text (emacspeak, for instance, uses a set of such icons to supplement the
> speech).


Initially we wanted activities to be self voicing, and just provide a
highlight and speak option for sugar. Call it lack of vision or information.
However if we think a little ahead of us now, then someday one may want a
complete accessibility toolkit on the xo. Which may lead to conflicts with
the present speech server.

We are kind of stuck at this point about the issue i have just described.
Any ideas would be welcome!

Best,
Hemant
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