Re: Slackware is dropping Gnome

[Kenny Hitt <kenny@hittsjunk.net>]

Hi.

The KDE screen reader won't happen soon because the basic libs for KDE are
still being rewritten.  Once that happens, a screen reader like
Gnopernicus should be able to work with it with few changes.  KDE is
using AT-SPI same as Gnome.

Mark wrote Orca as an alternative to Gnopernicus, but he no longer works
for Sun and I haven't seen any updates to it's CVS since July.
It seems development of GUI access is happening much slower than console
access.  My personal view is this is happening because the developers of
GUI access don't depend on it to use there computers while the
developers of console access do.

My girl friend is also non technical, so she only uses Linux in Gnome.
She wouldn't even consider trying to use a command line.  One of the
cool things about the GUI interface in Linux is you don't really need
access to support it.  Mary Ann started using Gnome 1.4 which had no
access for me.  I read docs and edited Gnome's config files in the
console.
If your girl friend is sighted, she will have no problems with using
Gnome.  If she's used Windows, she will like the improvements.

Hope this helps.
          Kenny
	  
On Sat, Apr 02, 2005 at 01:24:23PM -0800, jim grimsby wrote:
> Well dave has been complaining about this for quite some time.  At first
> his problem was not clear because he was doing a lot of talking about
> software speech and a radio show but the problem is clear.  Kde is
> coming out with a screen reader for it soon according to peater.  He
> said it was hopeful.  Mark has created an alternative to gnopernicus
> witch I have not herd a lot about yet. It seems to me at this point
> after doing a lot of reading that the gui support has a long way to go.
> The nice thing is with speakup we can do every thing we would need to do
> in text mode.  The reality is though that we really need this gui
> support.  There are a lot of programs that are created using this gui
> interface.  Also gui is easier for the new user to learn. Monkey see
> monkey do is always going to be easier then typing a lot of commands at
> a command line.  I got in to linux hoping I could start building
> computers for blind people with a easy to use interface that would be
> the same across the board from program to program.  Sorry to say I have
> not found this yet.  Gnome still has to many problems to be a stable
> solution. Gnopernicus crashes more often then jaws does at this point.
> I my self am going to keep a close eyes on this situation as I get text
> based programs for my self learn it and then try to teach my very non
> technical girl friend linux.  If she is able to grasp it using text mode
> there might be some hope for this project but if not I might need to
> wait another year or two.  
> 
>