idea for the installer

[Krister Ekstrom]

Hi folks,
I don't think the problem is the installer being accessible or not, at
least in Ubuntu, the graphical installer works very well, at least if
you have a hard drive dedicated to Linux. The thing that can be tricky,
or rather that is tricky is that speecha and braille don't follow when
you switch to being a root user from a regular user. You'll have to kill
Orca as a regular user and then start it again as root, and this can
sometimes cause problems. What would be good was if there was a way to
smoothly switch speech with the user so that one could switch users
without losing assistive technology and i think this is being worked on.
Please feel free to correct me if i'm wrong.
/Krister

On Wed, 2006-09-27 at 09:38 +0300, Veli-Pekka Tätilä wrote:
> mike coulombe wrote:
> > but if there is a real problem getting orca to work with the install
> > program. How about a automatic installer. <snip>
> I think that's a great idea especially for newbies who do want to go with 
> the defaults. About the only setting I changed myself was the locale FInland 
> that is. Based on that a smart installer should be able to figure out my 
> time zone and keyboard, although there might not be a 1to1 mapping for all 
> the other countries.
> 
> I've heard there might already be an automated deployment system for Debian, 
> which is called I believe automated install (kickstart in Redhat). I've 
> never used the thing, though.
> 
> It would  be even better if the user could customize the setup. HACking some 
> well commented config file to do that might be an acceptable alternative 
> similarly to apps like doxygen for C plus plus programmers or the HTML Tidy 
> manual and config file for Web authors.
> 
> Personally, you guessed it, I would rather do this via some GUI preferably 
> mirroring that of the installer as much as is practical. The only OS in 
> which I've done that myself and really liked it was Win98, though.
> 
> For Windows users, and I guess most people are switching from windows due to 
> the dominance and long-term development of apps like Jaws, Eloquence and 
> Zoom Text, there's another catch. That is you cannot generally make a good 
> accessible Windows GUI with Linux GUis like TK or GTK, or at least I've 
> never seen any. Maybe a cross platform solution with ports to various OSes 
> and GUI libs, if the users would like to do this customization before they 
> boot to the OS. Or some console affair written with a GUI screen readre 
> friendly text mode and ANSI C. AS to what's GUI reader friendly, little or 
> no ASCII graphics and using the standard cursor or something that's at least 
> shaped like a vertical bar for easy tracking.
> 
> Or if the live CD approach is prevalent, one could do this customization in 
> some specialty distro. Maybe it would fit on most USB sticks and you could 
> at the very least easily write out the changes on some removable media. On 
> the other hand, if the live CD could be made to speak the installer, most 
> people who don't have to deploy Linux on multiple machines, could just as 
> well use the speaking installer directly.
> 
> Regarding the defaults, if this is specific to folks needing accessibility, 
> I think the settings should reflect that. For ages I've been wishing for a 
> LInux distro that just worked in terms of accessibility. SOmething with as 
> many CLI and GUI readers, multi-lingual speech synths and accessible 
> versions (GTK2 or self-voicing) as is practical. Too bad the Oralux project 
> hasn't advanced all that much.
> 
> I think it would be great if Gnome had the assistive technology support 
> enabled by default. I cannot see why it already doesn't, in fact, unless 
> accessibility is a major performance or stability hit. OS X has the right 
> attitude in this, in that a user can just start using Voice Over, and when 
> he or she does that, speech, full keyboard access and the accessibility API 
> just works. In other words, no need  to configure anything. Besides, 
> configuring is difficult for many if you don't have speech or at least good 
> full-screen magnification preferrably with font smoothing (for truetype 
> stuff).
> 
> -- 
> With kind regards Veli-Pekka Tätilä (vtatila at mail.student.oulu.fi)
> Accessibility, game music, synthesizers and programming:
> http://www.student.oulu.fi/~vtatila/ 
> 
>