Planet-Accessibility

I just tried out the  Webvisum Firefox add on and web service as I've been telling people about it and thought I really aught to have a bit of a clue. And you know what? I'm really impressed, the various features for VI users are well implemented and most exciting are the community tagging and captcha solving. I tried a recaptcha which I recently setup on the Project:Possibility wiki and it works a treat, even solving a couple I could hardly work out myself. Anway I'll leave you to read a pukka review from Marco who unlike me actually knows what he is talking about.

The other success may be something of a surprise to many of you. It's Apple's Out Of the Box accessibility  story on Macs as revealed by Marco in a his comparison of accessibility on the 3 main platforms.

Now we just need Apple engineers to fully engage with the Open accessibility communities so we can ensure  the great projects like Firefox have the best possible accessibility on Macs.

Come on Apple, give us a bite!

Over the past couple of years, accessibility options have become more widely available than just on the Windows platform. Since GNOME 2.18, Orca has become part of the desktop package, offering a way for some distributions to be installed with some speech guidance.

Also, Apple entered the same field during the Mac OS 10.4 Tiger timeframe and offered the VoiceOver screen reader as part of the operating system. This is not new, since Mac OS X has since moved on to Leopard 10.5. But I recently had the first chance to play with it, and I must say I am deeply impressed! Once you turn on a Mac that you just bought, it prompts you that if you can’t see the screen, you can press Cmd+F5 to turn on VoiceOver. From that point on, it talks you through the Setup Assistant using a clear, very intelligible voice named Alex. This speech engine is built with a “breathing” algorithm making it sound even more natural than other current TTS engines. Once I had mine set up, I was wirelessly connected and ready to go.

For the fun of it, I also booted from the DVD. This boots a copy of the operating system and automatically launches the installer. However, even here you can press Cmd+F5 to get instant VoiceOver speech and full access to the installer and other utilities such as the Disk Utility that Apple offers for maintenance.

By comparison, on Windows, only part of the installer is accessible, and then only on English language versions of the operating system. And, it uses a voice called Microsoft Sam on Windows XP, and an only slightly better sounding female voice whose name escapes me right now for Vista. The part of the installer that, even under Vista, still runs in text mode, is not accessible at all. So disk partitioning, formatting etc., are all without speech support. The alternative way many of us use is an answer file that sucks in all the information and then lets the installer run automatically.

On Linux, the story can be slightly better depending on the distribution and the version of that distribution you’re using. Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy Heron was pretty good in that you only had to press a rather straight-forward series of keystrokes, but in right order, to get a talking installer. Ubuntu 8.10 made a huge lapse backwards unfortunately, again requiring the use of the command line, sudo, Ubiquity and the hope that you typed it all right while you had to quit Orca to get it running with administrative privileges.

I haven’t looked at the new Open Solaris, which is supposed to also have an accessible installer, so cannot comment on its story. Other distributions require other forms of blind-flying to get to a talking or brailling installer, which is nothing for the faint of heart.

Both Windows and Linux also suffer from the additional risk that the hardware in the computer you’re trying to install them on is not recognized. In worst case, the sound card won’t be recognized, leaving you completely in the dark. There, binding the operating system to specific hardware, like Apple does, has a clear advantage: They know what’s in their boxes and can make sure it always runs.

And again, nothing is as easy as pressing a single keystroke to get speech.

And the wwealth of applications that is already accessible on Mac OS X is breathtaking as well. Not only programs that come with the operating system or the additional applications package such as TextEdit, Mail, Safari, QuickTime and iTunes, but also third-party applications often used, or needed, by blind users are accessible. One is Skype, which is the preferred Voice-Over-IP application used by the blind community. Another is OpenOffice, which, starting at version 3.0, is a Cocoa application and has full VoiceOver support.

On Linux, Skype, for example, isn’t accessible yet. This is one of the most frequently asked-for applications, so it is hoped that with the migration from Corba to D-Bus for the accessibility infrastructure, this will become easier to do, but for now, the GNOME desktop accessibility story definitely misses out on this important application.

On Windows, Narrator is not even enough to get you to a point where you can download NVDA. So if you have to reinstall, make sure you put a portable version onto a USB pen drive before so you have good access to your system once it’s up and running.

In comparing these three platforms, it can be said that Apple took their time to come to the accessibility party, but what they came up with simply works great out of the box. In my opinion, this is a real alternative to Windows. So if you think about buying a new notebook or desktop computer in the near future, why not walk up to a Mac shop and take a look at the models there?

For the Mozilla story, this underlines that we better continue our effort soon to get Firefox accessible on the Mac so people can take advantage of things like WebVisum there, too.

If you’d like to listen to some demos of VoiceOver support on the Mac, there is a great three-part podcast series on Blind Cool Tech made by Mike Arrigo that is definitely worth the time listening to!

I didn't have a chance to write a weekly update last week due to the promised hack fest, which I will discuss in another post.

Here are the noteworthy changes to NVDA in the week prior to the hack fest:

• Aleksey Sadovoy contributed a command (NVDA+c) to report the text on the Windows clipboard.
• Several enhancements to virtual buffer pass through were added:
  • Instead of virtual buffer pass through on and off, NVDA now reports focus mode and browse mode, respectively.
  • Pressing escape while in focus mode returns to browse mode.
  • NVDA can now switch to focus mode or browse mode as appropriate for the control under the virtual caret. This is also known as automatic virtual buffer pass through, which I described in a previous progress update.
• Mick wrote a new SAPI 4 driver, which replaces the old sapi4serotek and sapi4activeVoice drivers. This new driver should fix the issues encountered with the previous drivers.

NVDA has been updated to work with Python 2.6. (In fact, it now requires Python 2.6 and will not work with Python 2.5.) Aside from the great new features in Python 2.6 which we can now use, this is the first stepping stone in the eventual move to Python 3.0.

Those running binary snapshots do not need to do anything; new snapshots will be built with the appropriate packages. Those running from source should check dependencies.txt in the NVDA source distribution for the current dependencies and update their systems accordingly.

Are you teaching a course in open source software development? Are you in an Open Source community or business that is willing to support the teaching of community open source development practices? Join the Roll Call!

See here for Give 1 Get 1 (G1G1) and more details.

[update] Good grief P&P is £50. I've aborted my order.

So, I finally got around to getting my OpenSolaris 2008.11 b101a rc1b build environment set up. I know it seems strange that it took me a while to do this, especially after doing the work for the accessible 2008.11 live CD. But, the world changes around you constantly and you need to change with it. So, starting with a virgin 2008.11 b101a rc1b system, I just performed the necessary steps to get my build environment set up. Here's a quick summary:

First, get the packages that are available on pkg.opensolaris.org:

pfexec pkg install sunstudio SUNWgnome-common-devel SUNWperl-xml-parser

Next, grab the JDS CBE (JDS Common Build Environment) stuff that's set up for an IPS-based distro such as OpenSolaris. The stuff is currently kind of in test mode, but it works well. Install it using the cbe-install executable that comes with it. All you really need to do is basically say "yes" to just about every question that the installer asks. That is, choose the answer that requires you to think or do as little as possible. You can download the stuff from here:

wget http://dlc.sun.com/osol/jds/downloads/cbe/test/desktop-cbe-1.7.0-rc1-x86.tar.bz2

Finally, update the m4 macro processor. The one that comes with JDS CBE is too old (GNU m4 1.4.2) and doesn't recognize the --debugfile option. You will get this error if you try to run Orca's autogen.sh with the GNU m4 1.4.2 processor:

unrecognized option `--debugfile=autom4te.cache/traces.0t'

You can get a recent version of the m4 processor from here:

wget http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/m4/m4-1.4.12.tar.gz

Build and install it. I put mine under --prefix=/usr/local. Then, modify your M4 environment variable to point to /usr/local/bin/m4 and you'll be all set. If you want to make things more permanent, you can modify /opt/dtbld/bin/env.sh to point M4 to /usr/local/bin/m4

The leaves this year have been simply stunning with a wide range and depth of hue from dark brown to bright glowing yellow. Often on the same tree, especially Birch. Somehow I don't have any good photos and have now missed the best. So I'll let you Google for some.

Each time I have been to Boston it's been the Columbus weekend which Willie Walker says it a bit too early for the famous New England 'leaf peep' spectacle. Perhaps 'one year'.

Note I spared you a cheesey Midi rendition of the tune with same name as the title of this post. Be thankful.

I just released Speclenium 0.0.5.

One of the bigger stuff I worked on was setting up a proper tree diff view that allows the user to grasp quickly how the two accessible object trees differ. So here is an example page. It represents the accessible tree differences between Firefox 3 and IE 8 Beta 2. The page they are both rendering is an ARIA  slider example.

I only tested this with Firefox, so it probably does not yet work on anything else. I also tested it with Orca, NVDA and Fire Vox.

Let me know what you think!

Looks like there are still spaces at the Recent Advances in Assistive Technology and Engineering conference.

Last year was excellent and I'll be taking Jambu, Maavis and DKey on my laptop in case anyone wants to see them.

See you there?

iheni rounds up some accessibility wikis

Some time back I set up a wiki for the ITCH Network of volunteers who provide free computer support to people with disabilities. The idea was it would be used to distill and share knowledge gained during calls. Unfortunately it has not caught on and most effort is on the mail list.

I've been a great fan of wikis  ever since stumbling across the original wiki - Portland Patter Repository. So thanks to Ward Cunningham for a great contribution to online collaboration.

DKey is a simple disambiguation keyboard that allows input using a few keys in much the same was as SMS texting on a mobile phone. It doesn't currently have prediction but that is planned.

Like all my favourite projects this was done to meet a specific user's needs. In this case one of Simon Judge's clients. Simon has been a long term collaborator on Open a11y and was a founder of www.oatsoft.org (and speechmakers before that). Simon wanted to use Tapir but needed a few changes like speech, direct input to another application and keyboard access (well actually synthetic keyboard input from a Grid2 grid that allows scanning switch input).

Tapir looked good as we originally thought (mistakenly) that it had prediction as well as disambiguation. So I decided to adapt it and as it is not under active development and the changes seemed quite major I basically did a fork for Dkey. As always in hindsight once you know how to do something you can think of a better way and I'd start from scratch next time to avoid a number of problems and lose a lot of unwanted artifacts in the code. See the Tickets for more details

Anyway do try DKey out and let us know what you think. There's more details on the wiki.

Ross Gardler reports on a talk on the work to provide disaster support with IT in the wake of the 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami as an example of Humanitarian FOSS.

When I heard the reports of the Web registry being developed I was impressed by the open way it was being approached and so it's great to get more details about the resulting Sahana project. An example to us all, especially on the day California is having  the quake shake-out preparedness  event.

How to carve that bird. I need all the help I can get.

One year the turkey took a long time to cook and I went to carve it after about 13 beers,” said Maurice Landry, who lives near Lake Charles, La. “The way I remember it, I bore down to take off the leg and the whole thing went shooting off the platter and knocked over the centerpiece.

It's been a long time since I started the accessibility work for OpenSolaris. With the OpenSolaris 2008.11 b101a-rc1b release candidate all the pieces of the puzzle have finally come together: eSpeak, the distro constructor, GNOME 2.24, etc. It's been so long in the making that it almost feels anticlimactic for me. A very nice e-mail, however, came across my desk this weekend. I had to pinch myself and even question Josh (the person who posted the message): did he really use OpenSolaris 2008.11? How could this be? Josh responded and confirmed that he just went ahead, downloaded the image, and installed OpenSolaris 2008.11 build 101, release candidate 1b. In base-29 talk, that's "osol-0811-b101-rc1b".

What the what?

Yep, it is actually possible, and Josh shows us that a user can install OpenSolaris independently. I also believe Josh is the first blind person outside Sun to have ever successfully installed OpenSolaris - way awesome. Give that guy a cigar! Note that the user experience is still a little bumpy, but I'm OK with that for 2008.11. Rather than perseverating on a direction that might be completely misguided, I wanted to make 2008.11 a release where we would have *something* for users to try and then transfer user feedback into improvements for 2009.04. This falls in with my belief that we really should let the user requirements drive the architecture and not the other way around.

More information can be found at the following links:

• The official announcement for OpenSolaris 2008.11 b101 rc1b
• ISO images available from the GENUNIX site
• Accessibility notes for the Live CD and Installer

Try it out. Help us make it better. Send your feedback to indiana-discuss at opensolaris dot org. Log bugs and add feature requests at http://defect.opensolaris.org/.