[indiana-discuss] Early work on accessible live cd and installer for Indiana
Brian Nitz
Brian.Nitz at Sun.COM
Fri Feb 29 04:27:45 PST 2008
Willie, have you seen this:
http://blogs.sun.com/setje/entry/happiness_through_ignorance
It looks like this is how you enable alternative consoles during a grub
boot. If this isn't the answer, maybe this blog's author would know the
answer to your questions.
Willie Walker wrote:
> Hey Brian:
>
> Sorry for the delay - I was traveling and then came back to a GNOME
> 2.21.91 deadline. I did accomplish a lot in the hotel room, and many
> thanks to those in the #install chat room who helped me get a lot
> farther.
>
> We are definitely very close to an accessible install for Indiana.
> The thing I'm excited about is that it's not a completely insane idea
> and it is well within our reach. I still need to write up my notes,
> but I'm guessing the next steps are:
>
> 0) Work to get the needed SFE packages (below) onto the CD. I also
> need to check in some changes to the SUNWgnome-a11y-speech.spec file
> to build the eSpeak driver if eSpeak is available.
>
> 1) Figure out how to set the appropriate properties via GRUB and then
> make them have an effect on the runtime environments of root and jack
> for the live CD. In particular, if one selects "Screen Reader" (or
> whatever we put on the GRUB screen), we need to dynamically make these
> modifications to ~root and ~jack:
>
> ~root/.gconf/.gconf/desktop/gnome/accessibility/%gconf.xml -- new
> file to enable a11y
> ~root/.orbitrc -- new file to allow jack to access GUI apps
> (nwamd) running on jack's display
>
> ~jack/.gconf/.gconf/desktop/gnome/accessibility/%gconf.xml -- new
> file to enable a11y
> ~jack/.conf/autostart/pulseaudio.desktop -- new file to start the
> PulseAudio daemon
> ~jack/.conf/autostart/orca.desktop -- new file to start Orca
>
> Related to this, I need to figure out how to set
> GTK_MODULES=gail:atk-bridge in the environment that's running nwamd.
> Without it, the nwamd GUI dialogs are inaccessible. Plus, I need to
> figure out why the autologin stuff isn't setting things up jack's a11y
> environment properly -- right now, I need to log out and log back in
> on the live CD in order for the a11y environment to work right.
>
> 2) We need to write a script for Orca to provide better access to the
> installer. We also need to do a thorough keyboard-only analysis of
> the installer. I think it's pretty good, but there might be some room
> for improvement (e.g., first letter navigation for very long lists in
> the timezone/region selection combo boxes).
>
> 3) For gravy, we could look into autostarting brltty for people with
> braille displays. Not sure how to do that, and I need to figure out
> where the missing symbol lives (ld.so.1 _ex_unwind).
>
> I wonder - should we consider making an accessibility project page for
> OpenSolaris/Indiana if one doesn't already exist? I'm trying to find
> the best spot to put my notes (once I write them) and for people to
> contribute/share.
>
> Will
>
> On Jan 30, 2008, at 6:59 AM, Brian Nitz wrote:
>
>> Willie,
>>
>> This is fantastic! I've often though about how useful an accessible
>> livecd could be to provide accessibility on borrowed computers at
>> libraries, coffee shops, but I had no idea we were so close with
>> OpenSolaris.
>>
>> I'll have a look at the ubuntu "F5 accessibility" option and your iso if
>> you provide a link to it. It may be a customization of the grub menu.
>>
>>
>> Willie Walker wrote:
>>> Hi All:
>>>
>>> This is just an FYI of some midnight work I've been doing -- literally
>>> in the middle of the night due to insomnia. ;-)
>>>
>>> I lead the Orca screen reader project, and I've been doing
>>> accessibility
>>> work for X Windows, Java, GNOME, etc., almost 20 years.
>>>
>>> One of the important developments I've seen in the accessibility space
>>> is an accessible live cd and installer for people with disabilities: I
>>> saw a number of people with disabilities migrating to Ubuntu and away
>>> from a number of distributions this time last year because of Ubuntu's
>>> accessible live CD and installer.
>>>
>>> The Caiman work and the distro_constructor have helped enable us to get
>>> moving in this direction. With a number of people's help, I was
>>> actually able to put some missing pieces together and create a live CD
>>> which I could manage to get speaking with Orca. Not perfect, but
>>> pretty
>>> neat.
>>>
>>> Here's where things stand:
>>>
>>> 0) Almost everything was already in place. Yeah!
>>>
>>> 1) I needed to pull in some SFE packages. These were to get me eSpeak
>>> (a very small speech synthesis engine) working. The SFEespeak.spec
>>> file is new as of this morning since I was tired of updating my
>>> IPS the manual way. Here's the extra packages. The *-devel's
>>> probably are not needed.
>>>
>>> SFEespeak SFElibsndfile SFEpulseaudio
>>> SFEespeak-devel SFElibsndfile-devel SFEpulseaudio-devel
>>> SFElibsamplerate SFEogg-vorbis SFEpulseaudio-root
>>> SFElibsamplerate-devel SFEogg-vorbis-devel
>>>
>>> tarred and zipped, these packages account for an extra 1459233
>>> bytes,
>>> still keeping the iso image small enough to fit on a CD.
>>>
>>> 2) I also had to hack here and there to get some other smallish
>>> files in place (e.g., the gnome-speech driver for eSpeak). They'll
>>> fall out with a reworked gnome-speech spec file.
>>>
>>> 3) There's still lots of work to do, and help is welcome:
>>>
>>> a) I would love to have an initial dialog similar to
>>> Ubuntu's where the user can select accessibility options.
>>> This is the very first screen you see when you boot from the
>>> Ubuntu live CD, and it allows you to select the assistive
>>> technology you'd like to use for the live session. If you
>>> look really hard at the following image, you'll see an
>>> "F5 Accessibility" option at the bottom of the screen:
>>>
>>> http://www.easy-ubuntu-linux.com/images/livecd-boot-menu-zoomed.png
>>>
>>> No clue how to do this. But, if it can be done, it might be
>>> a way to dynamically modify the 'jack' user with stuff to launch
>>> Orca and the things it needs.
>>>
>>> For now, if I can just make a one-off CD with a modified 'jack'
>>> user burnt on the CD, I'd be happy. Not quite sure how to do
>>> this, though. If anyone wants to push me in the right
>>> direction,
>>> I'm all ears. :-)
>>>
>>> b) I'd also like to figure out how to start brltty automatically.
>>> Right now, some prerequisite is missing (ld.so.1 _ex_unwind:
>>> can't find symbols), so a little more work is needed before
>>> getting to that.
>>>
>>> c) We will need to script a fair amount in Orca for the installer.
>>> These kinds of wizard dialogs wreak havoc on Orca's focus
>>> tracking logic, and we end up needing to provide a custom
>>> script to make sure important information is presented to
>>> the user. Nothing we didn't already know, though, based upon
>>> the investigation we did last year.
>>>
>>> d) Things like the network automagic dialog are completely
>>> inaccessible. I don't know what's going on with that at all,
>>> but it doesn't even seem to appear on the accessibility radar
>>> screen. Heck, I don't even know what app is running to cause
>>> that to pop up. If it's the nwamd process running as root,
>>> we have some work to do to modify root's environment (e.g.,
>>> enable accessible and set up a /.orbitrc file).
>>>
>>> 4) I'm struggling to reproduce these things on a 79b box. Getting
>>> there
>>> one step at a time.
>>>
>>> In any case, fun stuff. In addition, I'll bet we can get a whole
>>> community of people migrating to Indiana if we can make the accessible
>>> install a reality.
>>>
>>> Thanks folks! The Indiana work and the Caiman work are really helping
>>> in many ways. Again, help is welcome, too. :-)
>>>
>>> Will
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> indiana-discuss mailing list
>>> indiana-discuss at opensolaris.org
>>> http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/indiana-discuss
>>>
>>
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