[NFBCS] Linux Screen Readers

Mon Aug 22 23:48:54 UTC 2022

Mike,

Thank you for this explanation.

Best regards,

Steve Jacobson

-----Original Message-----
From: NFBCS <nfbcs-bounces at nfbnet.org> On Behalf Of Mike Gorse via NFBCS
Sent: Monday, August 22, 2022 10:02 AM
To: Steve Jacobson via NFBCS <nfbcs at nfbnet.org>
Cc: Mike Gorse <mike at straddlethebox.org>; Steve Jacobson <steve.jacobson at outlook.com>
Subject: Re: [NFBCS] Linux Screen Readers

Hi Steve,

There's an API called AT-SPI (as Rynhardt alluded to) that Orca uses. It is largely parallel to IAccessible2, the main difference being that IA2 is built on top of Win32 and IAccessible, while AT-SPI is dbus-based. AT-SPI is part of the GNOME project, but QT (the toolkit used by KDE) also implements it nowadays, as do WebKit, Chrome, Firefox, and Libreoffice (the latter three actually implement atk and use a bridge to provide AT-SPI).

-Mike

On Mon, 22 Aug 2022, Steve Jacobson via NFBCS wrote:

> Jim,
>
> As somebody who has only used Unix to some degree, I am reading this thread with great interest.  I understand that X11 does not contain the kind of metadata that is used to provide meaningful access to the system.    Given your comments, how does Orca get what it needs from Gnome?  Has there been an effort to incorporate the required metadata into the Gnome framework or is there enough metadata already present that makes some access by Orca possible?
>
> Thanks.
>
> Best regards,
>
> Steve Jacobson
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: NFBCS <nfbcs-bounces at nfbnet.org> On Behalf Of Jim Barbour via NFBCS
> Sent: Monday, August 22, 2022 8:00 AM
> To: NFB in Computer Science Mailing List <nfbcs at nfbnet.org>
> Cc: Jim Barbour <jbar at barcore.com>; Doug Lee <dgl at dlee.org>
> Subject: Re: [NFBCS] Linux Screen Readers
>
> Hey All,
>
> Brian, I understand what you're asking for, and would like to see if I can point you in a couple different directions.
>
> First, There is a basic technology problem with adding screen reader access to UNIX graphical applications.  X11, they platform they are all built on, does not maintain sufficient meta data about the applications.  X11 really thinks in terms of pixels, not in terms of terms of objects.
>
> That's why there are so many frameworks on top of X11, like KDE, Gnome, XFCE, etc.  The thing is, it is totally proper for there to be more than one framework in use at any one time. At best, Orca only knows how to deal with applications that exclusively use the Gnome framework, and not all of those.
>
> Having said that, I spend most of my working and personal time on a Linux machine. I use windows when I need a web browser, or Microsoft productivity tools (word, excel, etc.)
>
> The Linux command line and full screen terminal provide a very rich environment to do most of my work in. You might want to consider exploring more about Linux without X11.
>
> If you want to look at code development options on Linux, I highly recommend getting more familiar with Emacs and Emacspeak.  Emacs started out as a text editor, and has evolved into a very rich text display platform.  It understands about windows, tabs, formatting, text capture from many different sources including sockets, etc. Emacs is still very popular, and has many, many packages associated with it, including lots of different IDE packages. Emacs also has packages designed to have it mimic VS code.
>
> Emacspeak is an Emacs package written by T.V. Raman.  It has a non-trivial learning curve, but can get you access to almost everything that Emacs has to offer.
>
> I'm very open to answering more questions, and I hope this helps.
>
> Jim
>
> P.S. Mike is pretty much correct.  I have some remaining vision, so I do have X11 up and running, and the only applications I use with X are Xterm, emacs, and chromium.  Emacs works quite well without X11. The screen or tmux apllications can easily take the place of multiple Xterms, and I still move to windows when I have javascript heavy web pages to look at.  Brian Buhrow also heavily uses the UNIX command line and can say more about using these tools with no vision.
>
> On Mon, Aug 22, 2022 at 08:14:42AM -0400, Bryan Duarte via NFBCS wrote:
>> Primarily I am interested in having access to not only the shell but also the graphical side of the Linux OS. I use different flavors of Linux all the time through a SSH connection but I only do that to deploy software. I am doing my development on my Mac where I have access to Microsoft Visual Studio Code and other tools' but I would like to be able to boot up a Linux distro like Ubuntu and have access to all of those tools without a second parent system to interface with it. Does that make sense?
>>
>> I know there are ways of accessing Lynx or other browsers from the terminal, but to my knowledge there is no way to access graphical applications such as VS code, Firefox, or other tools. If Orca is the best screen reader we have to access the graphical side of Linux I feel we need to bring it up to date with other screen readers in terms of usability. Windows and Mac osX both have full desktop and terminal access with a screen reader. Since NVDA came out it has changed my belief that we could have a high quality, free open source screen reader for Linux.  Bryan Duarte Ph.D.
>>
>>
>>> On Aug 22, 2022, at 2:44 AM, Doug Lee via NFBCS <nfbcs at nfbnet.org> wrote:
>>>
>>> I'm not running YASR or similar; I'm using JAWS or sometimes NVDA
>>> on Windows. I'm currently writing this email in a Vim session on top of Mutt, a Unix mail reader for the text environment which is also full-screen.
>>>
>>> I'm not sure exactly what you're looking for with cursor positions.
>>> If you mean you can't see where the cursor is, perhaps I scripted
>>> for that many years ago and still use it in JAWS; haven't done as
>>> much in NVDA with full-screen apps I suspect. I was under the
>>> impression though that cursor finding works natively most of the time now. Of course, some apps need to be told; for example, Lynx (the cat) needs the -show-cursor option, and Mutt needs "set arrow_cursor" in its .muttrc file.
>>>
>>> As for actual numeric position, Alt+Del in JAWS gives me a good
>>> idea. In older JAWS versions it was pixel-based, but now it's
>>> character-based. Not sure about NVDA. Vim's Ctrl+G command presents position information on the bottom line as well.
>>>
>>> Let me know if I missed the mark entirely here. :)
>>>
>>> On Sun, Aug 21, 2022 at 10:40:06PM -0700, Brian Buhrow wrote:
>>>    hello Doug.  All of that makes sense, but when ever I use the cmd
>>> window in Windows, I can't get row and column information for the
>>> cursor position or for which line I'm currently reading from
>>> anything in that window.  Are you running something like Yasr in the
>>> WSL window to get speech directly from the virtual Linux box?  If
>>> not, how do you track row and column information?  That is, if you're cursor is on line 5 column 20, how do you determine that?  Or, If you're looking at some text, how do you determine where on the terminal screen that text is?
>>> -thanks
>>> -Brian
>>>
>>> --
>>> Doug Lee                 dgl at dlee.org                https://nam12.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Furldefense.com%2Fv3%2F__http%3A%2F%2Fwww.dlee.org__%3B!!IKRxdwAv5BmarQ!Z3tn2Nja_By3lW0amC4sro7NCUWzMNgOPvwJcGOpNYeET-9A9yznWjIkmYi6Isa5yFFt0vUyEiwH7g%24&data=05%7C01%7C%7C74cd293ac8894b3d3d8108da844fe029%7C84df9e7fe9f640afb435aaaaaaaaaaaa%7C1%7C0%7C637967775844050074%7CUnknown%7CTWFpbGZsb3d8eyJWIjoiMC4wLjAwMDAiLCJQIjoiV2luMzIiLCJBTiI6Ik1haWwiLCJXVCI6Mn0%3D%7C3000%7C%7C%7C&sdata=p29ElRzsDMSCpp3hBs6xUlFyP0pMAXfzV%2FOH%2Fmh51pE%3D&reserved=0
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