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

[Vikas Tara]

On 13/04/16 12:17, Krishnakant wrote:
>
>
> 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.
>
It's written in python and uses GTK:
https://github.com/linuxmint/live-installer/tree/master/usr/lib/live-installer

I will take a look at the toolkit you suggest.

The installer has quite a small codebase - so I'm hoping this is not 
actually going to be a mamouth task (compared to porting Ubiquity!)


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