Lubuntu and Accessibility

[Alex H.]

Hi,

Doesn't Adriane Knoppix run some form of LXDE with Orca? From the
little I've used it, it's not slow, but then again I've got much
better specs than what we're aiming for in this thread.
I agree that running Orca on anything slower than 1.5Ghz is just
simply painful, even with the increasing responsiveness of it. It's
certainly a resource hog and with a system that slow, might as well
just run CLI.

I think a more useful goal to pursue would be making XFCE more usable.
http://wiki.xfce.org/releng/4.10/roadmap/accessibility


On 5/23/11, Luke Yelavich <themuso at ubuntu.com> wrote:
> On Tue, May 24, 2011 at 09:58:58AM EST, Phill Whiteside wrote:
>> >From a general chat to our head of development on lubuntu, he is of the
>> opinion that if the code is really (and I mean really) tight, that it
>> would
>> be possible to include within the very tight constraints that we are
>> committed to be able to uphold the inclusion of accessibility and has
>> agreed
>> that we should really strive to attain this.
>
> The first thing is making sure LXDE is actually accessible, i.e make sure it
> has keyboard shortcuts, and supports the launching of the accessibility
> framework at startup etc. As to using the LXDE GUI with Orca etc, I think
> the biggest problem here is the use of python. The components of the stack
> written in c should be performant enough to work, and if they're not, then I
> am sure upstream would be willing to help try and optimize them a little
> more, but Orca being python is unfortunately a rather big blocker for this
> environment. I remember running Orca on a dual Celeron 466 a few years back
> in GNOME, and it was rather laggy in performance, I.e a quarter to half a
> second would go by before I got speech feedback from my action.
>
> So while I think the goals of getting Lubuntu more accessible are noble, I
> am not sure it will be possible for it to be doable with acceptable
> accessibility performance for users. I am not saying don't try, but unless
> Orca or another screen reader was developed in c, then using orca on LXDE is
> likely to be somewhat painful.
>
> Luke
>
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