[Hamara-devel] Mint Installer Usability (was: Ubiquity Packaging Work)

[Vikas Tara]

On 13/04/16 16:45, Vikas Tara wrote:
> 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!)
Came across this I thought was worth posting:
http://www.linuxjournal.com/magazine/make-your-application-accessible-accerciser
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