Ubuntu phones and accessibility for the blind

[Luke Yelavich]

On Tue, Mar 01, 2016 at 03:12:58PM AEDT, Michael Pozhidaev wrote:
> Hi guys,
> 
> A lot of rumors appears around the Ubuntu phone, what is very great news
> in itself. I'm just wondering is there any work to make this phone
> accessible for the blind? Or it is already suitable now? Anyway, what is
> its status regarding its accessibility for the blind?

In short, non-existant at the moment.

> I'm a totally blind man. Due to very serious concerns on Android's
> security, I'd like to find something different. My question is mostly
> about basic phone functions, including making calls, maintaining
> contacts list and SMS reading, rather than general accessibility in
> applications.

> If there is nothing ready with that yet, I agree to participate in any
> work which potentially could result in necessary features for the
> blind. I'm a software engineer working on Linux for a long time, and I
> would be happy to be useful. But, of cource, if there are any ideas what
> to do.

There is much to be done to get this off the ground. Given that Canonical is writing its own display server Mir, the first requirement is to properly tie in the accessibility infrastructure, mainly at-spi, into working properly with Mir to intercept input events, and extend at-spi itself to support touch. It would then be a matter of extending Orca to work with touch, and not requiring Gtk support. In addition, Qt's own linux accessibility support would likely need much work, particularly the QML accessibility components. Ubuntu's QML based SDk would also need much accessibility work.

Thats a high level overview, but I hope it sheds some light on what needs doing.

Oh... Yeah, Canonical decided to write its own wrapper around Chromium as well, so work is needed there too to add accessibility support, then add support for that to Orca.

Luke