LiveCdAccess

Revision 7 as of 2006-06-19 13:41:25

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Live CD Access

Summary

Further improve the Live CD access features.

Rationale

This spec is a continuation of https://launchpad.net/distros/ubuntu/+spec/accessible-livecd

Use cases

  • Sarah has low vision and finds the current live CD boot menu difficult to use. She read on the website that she should boot the CD and press F5 but the menu that pops up then is too small to be of use to her. A full-screen, hight-contrast version would alow her to perform the Live CD boot and system install independently.

  • Oscar is blind and has a similar problem with the boot menu as Sarah, though the large version won't help him. Some audio feedback, either spoken words or distinctive tones would be a great help.
  • Henrik is very pleased with the default support for sticky keys on the new live CD. With that he can boot the CD and start using the Gnome menus directly and also launch and complete the Ubiquity install process independently. Some areas of the Ubuquity installer are a bit cumbersome to navigate with the keyboard, but it works.
  • All users: After the install is complete, the access features that were enabled in the Live session are no longer turned on. This means these users cannot actually start using the system until someone else comes along and activates the access features.

Scope

For Edgy we should expand the scope to include:

  • Better provisions in the gfxboot menu for the visually impaired
  • Ensure that administration tools run as sudo can communicate via AT-SPI
  • Test Ubiquity thuroughly for AT-SPI functionality
  • Allow acessibility profiles used during the live CD session to be installed to the HD
  • integrate the new assistive technologies appearing in dapper, which may include: Orca, SOK, compiz-mag, speech dispatcher, speakup and kttsd
  • Kubuntu and Xubuntu versions (with U/Edubuntu already being established)

Design

Mock-up of a new, high-contrast boot menu:

attachment:NewBootMenu.png

Implementation

gfxboot

  • Uses 16x16 bitmap fonts -- these need to be scaled up by dithering to 48x48 or more
  • Audio feedback is possible with mod files. The sound signals will be different for mifferent menu choices. The sounds are not spoken words and thus do not require translation. The meaning of the different sounds can be found on a web page at access.ubuntu.com, which would have an explanation in plain-text.

sudo issues

Covered in separate spec

Ubuquity

  • Keyboard navigation is fairly good but needs testing band tweaking. Access keys (Alt+key) can be autogenerated by Ubiquity.
  • The City selection interface has poor usability for everyone and esp. for keyboard-only users.
  • Partition manager has two AT problems:
    • It is cumbersome to navigate with the keyboard
    • The list of pending operations takes up a lot of screen space which will cause problems when using large fonts

multilingual speech-synthesis support

  • Option 1: Festival (large) in English on the live CD and the other supported languages (~10?) on the live DVD. Option 2: use a lighter speech engine live Espeak on the Live CD

Braille support

  • USB devices can be auto-detected, but serial ones cannot

Install Losing Settings

The final usecase/problem has been reported as a bug in casper and should be relatively easy to address: https://launchpad.net/distros/ubuntu/+source/casper/+bug/50319

Outstanding issues

  • Can gfxboot support the type of menu illustrated above, and can it upport audio playback?

BoF agenda and discussion

Edited text dump from Julia's notes.

  • Low vision users have problem booting CD -- pressing F5 is not intuitive.
  • We should increase the font size of F5 menu. Audio feedback would be ideal, but tricky to manage.
  • gfxboot does have sound support but can only play MOD (i.e., Amiga MOD) files
  • It only contains support a s single fontOnly one font available currently (scaled jaggedly at 16 x16).
  • We should create new font automatically from unitfont---wide language coverage needed. Code in GFX boot language for screen.

Language agnostic signs. Website with explanation of features. Demo of CD booting and sounds. SUDU surface covered in separate spec.

Kubuntu version weak ubiquity. Generative rather than static. Automatic assignin of keys. Sithy selector is bad for everyone--500 cities. City selector needs improvement. Language list is difficult to use--too long. Possibly select continent and country. Partition manager also difficult to use simply with keyboard. New unifont is a bit mapped. Dither up to something higher--not aesthetic needed, but functional. Giffs. Per user--what technologies to offer. Live cd-to installed version--bounds keys, live session tweak that. Fresh install and start again---thus should be optional. Bug in Casper. Casper provides hooks for ubiquity. More than one setup that wants to use ubiquity. People do bizarre stuff with Nitz. Accessibility tags in launchpad.

New technology, new Edgy things. New on-screen keyboards, working on with summer google students. Not GNOME defaults. De-install GNOME onscreen keyboard. Should be in C lists. Anything special needed for livecd? Close to desktop as possible. Speakup current, normally use if bootup commandline. Speakup inclusion. What is setup for each of the profiles. Kamag despite tracking. screenreader is problem. Currently GPS reader but no screenreader. Accessibility framework, currently depends on GNOME. Drop corebomb and use DBOS. Become agnostic. Push new stuff into KDE aggressively. KDE4 coming out sometime this year. Driver for that, tools of future into Ubuntu accessibility. Where to push things?

LImited space in Festival. Might replace Festival. More language files in space. Prompt when startup. Space synthesiser--e-speak. Can work with several languages and is super tiny. English speech-synthesis. Language selector spot at festival install, conditional dependency. Braille support. Serial device. Festival support for 10 languages currently, 5 are good now. Voice however might not be good. Switch possibility. Some only halfway good. How to improve language support files--black magic. Hard problem. speech recognition twice as hard.

References