Ubuntu-accessibility Digest, Vol 54, Issue 23

[Kenny Hitt]

On Sun, May 23, 2010 at 12:16:12PM -0400, Eric S. Johansson wrote:
> On 5/23/2010 11:26 AM, Kenny Hitt wrote:
> 
> > There isn't a kernel module in this case since they are using sane.
> > I regularly build and install kernel modules without needing to reboot.
> > Maybe these notes were for Windows?  That is the only explanation I can
> > come up with to explain this.
> 
> I went and read which reveals that is a Linux solution. I have observed that 
> scanner interfaces are, fragile at best, and I'm not surprised they want to 
> reboot with the device turned on.
> 
I just switched scanners yesterday with no need to reboot.  That idea about scanners doesn't match
with my experience in Linux.

> > Fortunately for me, I don't need this app since I already have a functional ocr solution .
> > in Linux.
> > My solution involves a few shell commands.  It seems much simpler than this app in any case.
> 
> from reading the documentation, this application looks very simple and it is 
> aimed at visually impaired users.  if you can use a keyboard, this shouldn't be 
> a problem.
> 
Since I'm totally blind, that means I'm likely supposed to be one of the users of this product.
Since I have years of Linux experience, I don't have much confidence
in any app that tells me I need to reboot after installing a user space app.

> As for a few shell commands, that's a reasonably inaccessible especially from 
> speech recognition. Shell commands fail accessibility for a couple reasons. 
> First the discoverability. You have to know that command exists in order to find 
> out what it does unless you happen to remember it. I think I know of about 30 
> commands in the shell environment and I need to look at the man pages on 28 of 
> them but I do anything more than the basics. Yet there are hundreds of shell 
> commands that will probably do what I need except, I don't know they exist and I 
> don't know what they do.
> 
I find I'm still faster and more productive in the text console at a bash prompt than I've ever been in a
GUI like Gnome.  Gnome has never been stable or reliable enough for me to stick with it for more than a few months at a time.
I had 4 years of Windows experience and was one of the early adopters of Gnome accessibility, but Gnome hasn't lived up to it's
marketing.

> The second way they fail is presentation. The name of the command, how it's 
> invoked etc. it is not accessible either to speech recognition or 
> text-to-speech. The last one, text-to-speech, may do a more credible job at 
> presenting garbled text (command names, commandline arguments etc.) than speech 
> recognition will when generating the same.
> 
I don't follow this one.  help $command works for me with a screen reader any time I need a reminder of a built in command
$command --help works when I need a reminder for an external command.

> You are correct however that once you have a CLI idiom memorized it does become 
> easier to use because you associate a concept with a more complicated structure 
> and then just use the concept as shorthand for that structure.

Makes since.  Bash programming is very much like C.  I've spent long enough in Linux that I think
in Linux terms instead of DOS or Windows.  Even my GUI concepts are Gnome like instead of Windows like now days.

          Kenny