[indiana-discuss] Early work on accessible live cd and installer for Indiana

[Brian Nitz]

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
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