[NFBCS] Linux Screen Readers

Fri Aug 26 22:22:41 UTC 2022

Jim,

that was very helpful thank you for your thorough response. I was not aware that Emacs was so robust. I myself have always been of the VI or VIM camp so I never explored Emacs as an editor. Although I have known about Emacspeak for quite some time, I have never gotten into it. When you say Emacs has packages, how exactly does that work? Are you saying it has its own repository for installing plugins or packages built to extend the editors functionality? I was not aware of this fact either.

Regarding using Linux purely through the terminal is not a problem for most things. As I mentioned before I am good with everything up to development with tools. If I want to use VSCode, Jupyter Notebooks, or a browser to search for code documentation/examples I end up having to go back to another system which is a pain. I will look into Emacs and Emacspeak a bit more to see how I can leverage these tools. In the mean time i will look into Orca and how I can use that a bit more. I would not want to build a screen reader for Linux from the ground up to be clear. If I ever did jump into work with a screen reader I would most likely branch off of Orca, LSR, or some other previously developed framework. Thanks again 

Bryan Duarte Ph.D.

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> On Aug 22, 2022, at 8:59 AM, Jim Barbour <jbar at barcore.com> wrote:
> 
> 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://urldefense.com/v3/__http://www.dlee.org__;!!IKRxdwAv5BmarQ!Z3tn2Nja_By3lW0amC4sro7NCUWzMNgOPvwJcGOpNYeET-9A9yznWjIkmYi6Isa5yFFt0vUyEiwH7g$  
>>> No one alive is beyond hope; every second of life is a chance.
>>> (08/29/02)
>>> 
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