Unable to install using Orca

[Deborah Norling]

I am using both speech and Braille. I have also tried this process without
Braille.
 
I have tried installing using the Edgy release and the Feisty Fawn betas, a
daily build from March 30 and another from April 4. The results are the
same.
 
This is a Fujitsu 1.6 MHZ laptop with 512MB of memory and a 40GB hard drive
that seems to run the live CDS fine.
 
I tried all the sets of instructions I could find by googling, but will keep
this message from getting too lengthy by quoting only from the shortest
document which is in the Ubuntu wiki.
 
>... insert the CD
>In order to enable accessibility options, press F5. This
>will cause a list of accessibility options to appear: 
 
The boot options screen does appear. The access options appear. I've had a
sighted person confirm this.
 
I press 3 to choose Orca from the menu.
I press Enter, and Enter a second time to boot.
 
After a really long wait, booting finishes, desktop loads, Orca does run.
 
>Within a couple of minutes, Ubuntu will be loaded the assistive technology
feature you selected. In the screen reader case, the Orca Preferences dialog
>will be open (but will not have focus -- press Alt-Tab to give it focus). 
 
In my case the Orca preferences always has focus, it was never necessary to
press ALT-TAB.
 
I can alter the preferences fine, but Braille doesn't work unless I run
gnome-terminal, and from that window type:
sudo su
brltty -bauto -d/dev/ttyUSB0
 
I already know how to use brltty but nowhere do the  instructions say that
step is necessary, and in fact the orca preferences has Braille already
checked, so   I wonder how current these instructions really are.
 
I play around with the preferences and the live CD. I can't get the online
help to read, but other apps work some of the time. It is disappointing that
Help, so crucial for a newbie like me doesn't seem to work well with Orca.
 
Anyway, so now I have Braille and my preferences all set so I go back to the
instructions. They read:
>The Install icon on the desktop allows you to install Ubuntu onto your hard
drive...
 
but then goes on to tell me that way of installing won't work because Orca
is somehow tied to my current account. This makes little sense to me; I've
used brltty and speakup for several years, and never had an issue like that
before.
It then gives me a six-step work-around:
 
>1. Press Alt F2 to get into the Run Application dialogue 
Works fine.
 
>2. Type "gnome-terminal" and press Enter. 
Yeah that work too. 
 
>3. In the resulting Terminal window, type "sudo su" and press Enter. 
Also works as expected.
 
>4. Press Insert Q to quit Orca. At this point, you will have no speech, but
focus is still in the terminal window. 
 
Actually, you have to tab to Yes, and press spacebar or enter. but then Orca
is gone.
 
>5. Type "orca --no-setup &" and press Enter. This will cause speech to
resume, but Orca will now be running as root. 

That works, at least Orca doesn't pop up any preferences applet, it displays
"welcome to orca" in Braille and speaks it aloud.
 
But after that, Orca just  stops responding to keystrokes. The system hasn't
crashed, I can see screen activity and there's lots of CD thrashing if I run
another app. But Orca is silent. Unfortunately, sighted help, my husband, is
occupied, but I can see enough to know it isn't frozen.
 
I tried altering the instructions, since they didn't seem too trustworthy. I
tried rebooting, then following all the same steps but running orca without
the --no-setup and it seemed happier. It asked me a lot of questions, but
then loaded and continued to read me the terminal screen while I tried out
some console commands.
 
So I went to the next step in the instructions:
 
>6. Type "ubiquity" and press Enter. 
 
After that Orca reads a long incomprehensible list of what appears to be
some sort of ubiquity log output. The date repeats frequently and lines
begin with ubiquity: etc. However I don't seem to be able to interact with
it. When I press enter, it rereads the output, but it is some sort of
tty-console output that is automatically scrolling, like typing Cat with the
name of a big text file. There is an occasional $ prompt. I have no idea how
to capture this output.
 
At this point the system appears to be stuck. The keystrokes for flat review
do nothing but cause the output to repeat. I can't break out of it. The
system doesn't respond to alt-tab, or alt-f4, but Enter causes more output
to scroll. It isn't exactly frozen but I can't switch to another task
either.
 
I've tried other variations, such as booting and not pressing F5, just
letting it boot, then running Orca with Alt-f2.  Orca does talk, but the
results are as above.
 
I've tried skipping the gnome-terminal step and just running all the
commands by pressing Alt-f2 before each one, and filling in the edit box. No
luck there either.
 
Another earlier and longer set of instructions had me running Orca in such a
way that it automatically logged me out, then back in again, all automatic,
and that was interesting, but it didn't make it possible for the ubiquity
command to do anything useful.
 
I tried skipping the brltty step which was never part of any instructions I
read anyway.
 
I even tried the desktop install icon, but it seemed to shush Orca as well.
 
I would really like to see instructions with a bit more depth. Why for
example do you kill orca, then run it again with the --no-setup option?   Is
brltty supposed to be already active before Orca? Why are there details
about how to set your preferences, but then the next step has you killing
Orca, and running it in such a way that it can't use the preferences you
just set? The instructions are trying to be user friendly but in not
explaining why a step is necessary, they are also only useful if everything
works as expected.
I'm so new to this Linux-gui stuff I don't really know how to troubleshoot.
If you can tell me how to save an activity log and submit it somewhere, I
will.
 
--Debee
 
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-accessibility/attachments/20070404/59cb24c2/attachment.htm