[Hamara-devel] Fwd: Re: Ubiquity Packaging work

[Krishnakant]

On Tuesday 12 April 2016 07:56 PM, Vikas Tara wrote:
> On 12/04/16 14:35, Raju D V wrote:
>> There are a lot of such issues which makes packaging Ubiquity for
>> Debian/hamara a difficult and time consuming task.
>>
>> Considering the time which has been lost trying to port Ubiquity on
>> Debian/hamara, we have decided to ditch Ubiquity for the time being and
>> use live-installer from Linux Mint.
>>
>> Live-installer is an easy to use OS installer and works fine with debian
>> based systems.
>>
>>   Compared to Ubiquity the only place where live-installer fails to
>> perform well is the accessibility part.
>> If we can get live-installer completely accessible then it is a worthy
>> option to Ubiquity.
>>
>> Making this change will help us releasing the Debian based Hamara Sugam
>> distro in a shorter time frame and in a better way.
>>
>> Looking forward to your opinions,
> Thanks Raju and for all the effort on Ubiquity so far, however this 
> does seem to be right time to throw in the towel.
>
> I'm keen to work on the accessibility side so am looking into how to 
> make that happen.
>
> Would be interested in any pointers from anyone - as I've not worked 
> on bringing orca support to an application before.
It will be a difficult task although not impossible.
Firstly is the said application (installer in this case ) using gtk?
if yes then gtk has got classes that implement accessibility.
That library is called AT-SPI meaning accessibility toolkit service 
provider interface.
meaning there is a class for making input fields accessible, then there 
is one for button, checkbox etc.
As developers or modifiers of any application written in gtk, one has to 
inherit these classes in every widget.
Then for the application the atspi service should be integrated which 
provides accessible events such as locus of focus.
Orca or any other screen reader is then programmed to consume these 
standard events and get the accessible information out.
it then sends this information to a speech synthesizer like Espeak 
through either dbus or some thing similar.
So I guess that makes it quite a work to do.
Debian's text based installer has become accessible off late so that is 
one distant option available.
So if a blind person has little bit of hacking knowhow as in how to 
change the boot time parameters to start with voice (kernel has the 
speakup module by default ) and then how to understand a few technical 
terms then it will be possible to Install Debian through the keyboard 
with command line mode.
So this is the current situation.
If installer itself is not accessible then there is no question of 
calling distro an accessible one.
Further more, Orca not just makes things accessible for blind, but also 
for low vision people, and those who are def and blind as well, through 
braille display output support.

    There are plans in order to make some thing for people with CP also.
    So all in all it become a big population.
    Thanks a million vik for this due consideration, there are very few
    people in the community who go so far with seriousness about
    accessibility.
    Ease of developing, low challenges and not much work to do are most
    reasons why many developers avoide to take this challenge.
    For example GNUKhata has been made totally acccessible no matter what.
    I am seeing the eferts put by Mate guys in accessibility and I am
    really impressed.
    I see Hamara taking this seriously as well.

happy hacking.
Krishnakant.
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