Initial impressions of 11.10

[Nolan Darilek]

Just slapped this onto an old netbook I'm trying to revive. Here are my 
initial impressions.

I love the new way to run accessibility on the live CD. Great! I just 
wish it also worked from the instance that gets run when you choose to 
try without installing. Running manually works, but consistency would rule.

Had some issues with the install, but those weren't accessibility related.

My new installation didn't come up talking. I had to run Orca manually, 
enable accessibility and log back out and in. My expectation was that 
it'd come up talking as soon as I logged in.

Along similar lines, Orca doesn't run automatically. I have to start it 
manually. This despite my impression that the screen reader toggle in 
the accessibility settings screen is enabled. I can't seem to find a 
"Run Orca on startup" option in Orca's preferences anymore.

Unity seems quite keyboard accessible. Going to need time to get used to 
the many new commands.

My timezone is incorrect and I can't figure out how to reset it. In Time 
and Date I see a text area containing the location New York, but I can't 
figure a way to set this to anything local to me. I tried entering 
"Chicago" since that's usually the timezone I choose, but that doesn't 
seem to take.

Lots of widgets seem to be misrepresented as checkboxes. In particular, 
many menu items appear this way.

I'm not clear on how to navigate some of the panels in Unity 2D. They're 
also said to be inaccessible even though I did get some feedback from 
Orca at one point.

All notifications speak "Notification: notify-osd". I have to look at 
.cache/notify-osd.log to see what I missed.

While this is a long list of negatives, I'm quite impressed at how 
accessible things are after such a major change. I probably won't put 
11.10 on my main machine for now, but I'm enjoying playing with it on 
the netbook.