Hello,
Thanks for some of that info Marc, I probably can say some more helpful
stuff now.
Firstly the firstboot application. If it is written in GTK this has some
promise for use with orca. I don't know the exact environment firstboot
runs in (IE. is it gnome or is it GTK compiled to use the frame buffer
directly, etc). To make it possible for orca to access firstboot we
would need at-spi started and from the users view it would be good to
have a key press to start orca (I understand you wouldn't want orca
running by default). I am assuming that for a liveCD install the
firstboot application will use the GTK frontend, if not then I need to
consider the text console screen readers (I hope this is not the case as
I don't think fedora has a text console screen reader by default and it
could be harder to push for extra stuff to be added, space can be very
restricted on a LiveCD).
Now to the other alternative, disabling first boot. I actually got a
message from another list where someone seemed to remember being told to
disable first boot with chkconfig, does this do basically the same
thing? Also if I were to disable firstboot, would I also need to
manually add a user account? It would be useful for me to know this and
then I could look at may be putting together a GUI app to do these
things from the LiveCD (initially it would be something I would write
and users might need to download to the live environment but I would
hope over time it could become integrated into the fedora LiveCD).
Once this firstboot problem is solved at least the install process would
be possible. There then would be minor issues, possibly some of them
easier to solve. Here are the ones I can think of at the moment (NOTE: I
am trying to give full details so it may get quite long, some of them
should be very simple to solve hopefully):
* Would it be possible to have espeak as the default speech synthesiser?
Reasons, I think it is clearer, its more controllable for a screen
reader (eg. I don't really detect a speed change when I alter the speed
in orca when using festival), espeak is much more responsive than
festival (there are moments where I think orca has stopped responding in
the installer but its just orca slow to respond and festival makes it
worse), espeak supports more languages than English and I think it is
smaller than festival. I think the package names are espeak and
gnome-speech-espeak that you would need. I have considered this minor as
users can use the package manager to install the required packages into
the live environment, if this were not possible then I would consider
this fairly important.
* Could we have a start up sound when the gnome desktop is loaded IE.
after the log in screen disappears, hopefully as close to the point the
user can start using the gnome desktop). The reason is how is a blind
user meant to know when the LiveCD is ready to use unless they have
something to alert them to the fact. Other distributions have added a
"accessibility" option to the boot menu but possibly I like the idea of
the start up sound for the desktop better, many question how a blind
user should know when the boot loader is waiting for a boot option to be
selected and what keys to press for the "accessibility" option. What I
am suggesting avoids this problem as they let the CD boot, wait for the
start up sound, may be give it a few seconds for the desktop to continue
to load as the sound normally happens a little before the desktop is
completely loaded, then they press alt+f2 for run and type orca and
press enter and let orca start guiding them through initial set up
questions. NOTE: the alt+f2 and typing orca is standard gnome stuff so
isn't a magic distro specific combination. I don't see this option
impacting on the "average" user as sound is enabled by default anyway
and some systems do have start up sounds.
* When I select the icon on the desktop to start the install, orca
reports this as inaccessible. Now I have found if I open a gnome
terminal and use su, relaunch orca as root and then launch liveinst
(again as root, don't know about selecting the desktop icon) then the
installer is accessible. There are many reasons why applications running
with privileges may not be accesslibe, ranging from a correctly set up
/etc/orbitrc to the use of policykit (more recently I think), etc. While
I don't know the answer to this specific case, I know such a problem can
be overcome as I believe ubuntu solved this (they did suffer from the
issue some time ago), opensolaris has none of this issue, etc. This is
important to solve as relaunching orca as root does mean a temporary
time without speech output for the user.
* When I need to select the timezone orca is very unresponsive (this is
where using festival really shows but even using espeak is painfully
slow at this point). I believe the issue partly stems from the combo box
containing so many items, could this be split into two combo boxes (eg.
one for continent and one for country in that continent, this is what
opensolaris does). Even if my suggestion doesn't improve the
responsiveness of orca, splitting the selection would be good as having
to use the keyboard to cursor through so many choices is very slow anyway.
Sorry if the above seems a bit much, I don't mean it to seem that way, I
just felt may be give full details of what the other issues are as I
imagine some of them might be very easy to solve.
Michael Whapples
On 01/-10/-28163 08:59 PM, Marc Herbert wrote:
Michael Whapples wrote:
> If there is a good reason why some may want the first boot
> application, may be it could be an optional thing
>
Disabling firstboot is possible; just create the file
"/etc/sysconfig/firstboot" with the following line: RUN_FIRSTBOOT=NO
Maybe some GUI could do that for non-technical users.
> The big question would be though, what screen reader will work with
> first boot? I am sorry I can't answer this as I can't see the first
> boot application and so don't know if it is text based, GTK based,
> etc.
>
Like most RedHat system administration tools, firstboot is written in
Python and features both a text-based frontend and a GTK/Glade
frontend. It prefers the full screen Glade frontend in case X is
available. Otherwise it falls back on /usr/bin/setup, which a basic
ncurses-looking menu to the usual system-config-* text-based tools.
Cheers,
Marc