Future of accessibility under Ubuntu

[Eric S. Johansson]

Bill Cox wrote:

> If Canonical cares about support for the visually impaired, then it may
> be time to mount a significant effort to put out this fire.  On every
> blog I'm reading, the visually impaired are recommending that users
> switch away from Ubuntu.  I am currently running Orca and Ubuntu 9.04,
> and I have to offer that same advice.  It's more than just removing
> pulseaudio.  I've hacked problems for a week straight, and Orca is still
> not functioning properly.  There are at least a dozen major problems,
> and not all of them have work-arounds yet.  Clearly there was zero
> testing of Orca for 9.04.

I hope you do not consider me root for pointing out the accessibility doesn't
stop with the blind. As much as you may be dependent on text-to-speech, I am
extremely dependent on speech to text (i.e. speech recognition). Naturally
speaking kind of works under wine and it really needs some dedicated
effort/money/something to get it to the point where we can dictate into any of
the next application. I have some ideas on how to bridge that gap but first we
need a stable NaturallySpeaking.

 current open source speech recognition systems are a waste of time and money.
They are the wrong tool for the application, says the man with 15 years
experience using speech recognition.