Mailinglist Archive: opensuse-factory (242 mails)

["Darragh O'Heiligh" <DOHeiligh@xxxxxxxxxx>]

> > > On 29/11/2007 at 00:16, in message <1196295371.16075.47.camel@xxxxxxxxxxx>,
Hans Petter Jansson <hpj@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> On Wed, 2007-11-28 at 09:21 +0100, Stanislav Visnovsky wrote:
> > Dňa Wednesday 28 November 2007 04:23:55 Hans Petter Jansson ste
> > napísal:
>
> > > * What accessibility technologies are available in the installer today,
> > > and how are they configured?
>
> > AFAIK, we have support for visually impaired people:
> > - linuxrc can be run in linemode to allow screen readers
> > - yast2 ncurses interface has high contrast color scheme available
> > - there is support for braille peripherials
Yes. there is support for a small number of Braille displays in the text based 
installer thanks to SBL however most
newer displays are not supported and more to the point, most blind people do 
not own a Braille display or even depend on
a braille display independantly for reading an interface.  Most people use 
synthesized speech output offered by
synthesizers such as Festival, Espeak FLite or other similar engines.  

> Is this easily available in the installer, though?
No. If you do not have a supported braille display SBL will not start.  If you 
have one of the displays that are
supported, SBL should start automatically. 
It's been my experience that mainly German displays are supported. 

> > > * If we're missing accessibility functionality, how feasible would it be
> > > to implement it for 11.0?
>
> > Depends on the technology. One constraint I see right away is the size of of 
>
> > inst-sys, we would need to do some magic there to keep it reasonably sized.
> >
> > First, we would need to know exactly what we want to support. The 3 points 
> > above?
>
> I think the screen reader would be the most useful component, since that
> seems to be what people who can't see at all use. I'm told such users
> currently need human assistance in order to install openSUSE.
Yes.  I am definitly one of those users. To install OpenSuSE I need to get 
someone in this office to read the screen. 
Alternatively, I can do an install over SSH however this is not a very clean 
option. 
In my view, a screen reader will cover most visual impairments as even if 
someone has very poor site and requires a
magnifier they can listen to the synthesized speech to navigate the installer.  
The same cannot be done for a magnifier
for the Blind... 

> Braille would primarily be for people who are completely blind and deaf.
>
> The magnifier would be a nice bonus, but I don't think it's strictly
> required if we have the screen reader.
>
> Unfortunately, festival is pretty huge. Maybe espeak is smaller, or
> maybe we can pare it down somehow.
>
> -- 
> Hans Petter

What about adding a speakup modified kernel into the installation image?  Look 
at the Fedora modified distribution as
an example: http://www.speakupmodified.org.  Of course, some way of getting a 
screen reader in the graphical installer
would be more preferable. 


I would just like to add that it is great to see this discussion on OpenSuSE 
lists.  My thanks to Hanz and Bryan for
their work on this.  

Please do not hesitate to contact me directly if you have any queeries. 

Darragh Ó Héiligh
OpenSuSE Technical Support. 
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