Visually Impaired List Members

[Lorenzo Taylor]

It's hard to know where to post bug reports when something could be wrong 
anywhere on a rather long chain of libraries and apps. I don't think Thunderbird 
has a bug in it whereby it's nearly impossible to skip quoting, although it may 
have a part in it. The same seems to be true when using Evolution, except there 
seems to be no p and o navigation functionality there. Here's how the system 
basically works in Linux. Note that I'm not very knowledgeable when it comes to 
programming, so maybe an accessibility expert can jump in here. Is Luke from the 
accessibility team on this list? Poke.

There is a desktop environment, currently Gnome, in which applications are run 
and windows are created and manipulated. In this desktop environment there is an 
accessibility layer, called atspi which allows the applications to communicate 
with the screen reader and other assistive technologies. But it isn't even as 
simple as this. Somewhere either between the applications and atspi or between 
atspi and the screen reader is what appears to me to be another accessibility 
module called Gail and another called ATK, (accessibility tool kit). There are 
also other things called Bonobo, corba, orbit and the list goes on, and I don't 
know what these things do, other than the fact that the Orca developers and 
others interested in accessibility for assistive technologies are looking for 
new accessibility implementations that will work without much of these things, 
as many of them are deprecated in general practice and are scheduled for removal 
in a future version of Gnome. Apparently, working around these things will also 
allow KDE to become compatible with Orca in the future, but for some years now I 
have heard that this compatibility is on the way but isn't here yet. A shame, 
really, since I have heard a lot of good things about KDE and wish like anything 
I could bang on it a little. Using Thunderbird as an example, when I read an 
email, I turn on an option called karet mode. This puts a movable cursor into 
the message that allows me to navigate it using the arrow keys and other methods 
including the p and o (paragraph and large object) methods. Note that adding the 
shift key to these and other navigation keys will allow me to move backward the 
same ways. Also note that these navigation keys and karet mode are the same 
functions available in Firefox. The problem with skipping quoted text in 
Thunderbird is that it's unclear if Orca, which is the screen reader, simply 
hasn't implemented a navigation function to skip quoted text or if it can't see 
what is quoted and what is not because either Thunderbird itself doesn't 
communicate this information or it gets lost somewhere along the chain of 
accessibility libraries.

The Orca list is one where I have seen very little posting styles other than 
either top posting or simply not quoting at all. However, it is on the Orca list 
where discussions take place quite regularly regarding removal of pulseaudio 
because it has some bugs that people don't feel like reporting and they just 
want to chuck the whole thing in the trash instead, even though in spite of its 
bugs, Pulse is about the best thing for making most desktop PC sound work as 
expected without a lot of difficulty. Therefore, the Orca list seems to not be 
the best way to determine best practices for visually impaired users, although 
in recent weeks I may have changed the tone of the Pulse discussions by 
contributing my own trying to find out where best to report a problem I was 
having and to find a way to work around it without removing it or not using it. 
It may be possible, however, that someone there may know if there is a way to 
skip quoting that I don't know about or if it could be implemented, since the 
Orca developers themselves hang out there. I will poke the list to find out if 
this is the case.

Live long and prosper,
Lorenzo
-- 
Nia diligenta kolegaro
En laboro paca ne laciĝos,
Ĝis la bela sonĝo de l' homaro
Por eterna ben' efektiviĝos.
--La Espero, himno de Esperanto