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   1 [18:06] <Pendulum> Okay, it looks like _marx_ hasn't made it back from a work thing he got called out to so I'm going to do the session on Accessibility now and he'll do his session at 20:00 UTC when mine was originally scheduled
   2 [18:06] <Pendulum> unfortunately, I don't have access to the bot so please bare with me when it comes to questions as I have to try to catch them all myself
   3 [18:08] <ClassBot> Logs for this session will be available at http://irclogs.ubuntu.com/2011/01/29/%23ubuntu-classroom.html following the conclusion of the session.
   4 [18:09] <Pendulum> Just a quick intro, I'm Penelope Stowe and I'm the co-leader of the Ubuntu Accessibility team. My co-leader is Luke Yelavich (or TheMuso on IRC)
   5 [18:09] <Pendulum> I focus on the outreach and documentation side of the team, while he runs the development side.
   6 [18:09] <Pendulum> This session isn't a how-to guide and won't go into a huge amount of detail into any one program.
   7 [18:10] <Pendulum> Instead, it should give you an overview of what's availible for accessibility tools in Ubuntu.
   8 [18:10] <Pendulum> I'll also give you some resources for where you can get help and find more information.
   9 [18:10] <Pendulum> This session will focus on GNOME-based accessibility features. GNOME has used at-spi as it's accessibility toolkit. Right now it is switching to Dbus/at-spi2.
  10 [18:10] <Pendulum> I am also focusing on programs that can be found in the Ubuntu Software Center in Maverick.
  11 [18:10] <Pendulum> This means there are programs that may have worked in older versions of Ubuntu, which aren't currently there or that are in PPAs and will possibly be in the software center in the future.
  12 [18:11] <Pendulum> I'll also talk a little bit about a couple derivatives of Ubuntu which focus on accessibility features.
  13 [18:11] <Pendulum> I do want to note that this information is for Maverick (Ubuntu 10.10) and earlier. Due to the switch to Unity, the accessibility framework starting with 11.04 is changing, but I have no idea what may or may not change yet in how accessibility programs and features are accessed.
  14 [18:11] <Pendulum> Before I talk about specific programs, I want to talk about the Assistive Technologies menu, which can be found in System->Preferences -> Assistive Technology.
  15 [18:12] <Pendulum> This menu is where you can select your preferred accessibility programs and enable assistive technologies.
  16 [18:12] <Pendulum> You can use this menu to specify things such as how long to accept as a keypress, how to prevent accidental double clicking, and how quickly to respond to key presses.
  17 [18:12] <Pendulum> It's also useful for turning off and on sticky keys or specifying keystrokes to stand in for things you'd normally do with a mouse.
  18 [18:12] <Pendulum> This is also the menu you use to specify which programs you want for an alternate keyboard or as a screen reader.
  19 [18:14] <Pendulum> I also want to mention the accessible install process.
  20 [18:14] <Pendulum> When you install Ubuntu can an accessible install, this allows for you to choose between several different 'accessibility profiles' (such as blind or motor impaired) so you can have the tools to install without needing to be non-disabled.
  21 [18:14] <Pendulum>  Unfortunately, this process doesn't always work.
  22 [18:15] <Pendulum> In Lucid, the accessible installer was reached through a specific set of keystrokes
  23 [18:15] <Pendulum> in Maverick it didn't work at all initially. It is hopefully already fixed for Natty
  24 [18:15] <Pendulum> If you need an accessible install and want to run Maverick, I would suggest installing Lucid and upgrading.
  25 [18:15] <Pendulum> You can find instructions on doing an accessible install at: http://www.theopensourcerer.com/2010/08/13/going-headless/ (along with some humour)
  26 [18:16] <Pendulum> Does anyone have any questions about the Assisstive Technologies Menu or the accessible install?
  27 === ajain is now known as aju
  28 [18:18] <Pendulum> The first set of programs I'm going to talk  about are the text-to-speech programs.
  29 [18:18] <ClassBot> Texou asked: so today to install accessible Ubuntu, is there a manual?
  30 [18:18] <Pendulum> the post I linked to for http://www.theopensourcerer.com/2010/08/13/going-headless/ has a pretty good description of the install process and how to do it on Lucid
  31 [18:19] <Pendulum> https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Accessibility/doc/StartGuide also has information
  32 [18:20] <Pendulum> Any other questions?
  33 [18:21] <Pendulum> Moving on
  34 [18:21] <Pendulum> The most popular text-to-speech program is Orca, although it isn't just a screen reader, but has other capabilities as well
  35 [18:22] <Pendulum> Orca includes a screen reader, magnification capabilities, and braille capabilities, so it is more than text-to-speech, however most people when you say Orca think of it as a screen reader.
  36 [18:22] <Pendulum> Orca was developed by the Accessibility department at Sun Microsystems, however, with the acquisition of Sun by Oracle, it has moved to community-development only.
  37 [18:23] <Pendulum> Orca can work with programs that include the at-spi toolkit including the GNOME desktop, Firefox, OpenOffice, and many others.
  38 [18:23] <ClassBot> habeouscorpus asked: Does Orca do speech to text?
  39 [18:23] <Pendulum> No it does not. As far as I know Orca has no plans to do speech to text (I'll cover the limited options for speech to text later)
  40 [18:24] <Pendulum> More information about Orca can be found at http://live.gnome.org/Orca
  41 [18:24] <Pendulum> And, yes, it is named after the animal in the tradition of screen readers being named after aquatic animals. (The most well known is JAWS for Windows)
  42 [18:24] <Pendulum> Are there any other questions about Orca?
  43 [18:25] <Pendulum> Another text-to-speech program is eSpeak. eSpeak is command line based.
  44 [18:25] <Pendulum> It supports quite a few different languages
  45 [18:25] <Pendulum> There are several different versions of eSpeak including one specific to emacs.
  46 [18:26] <Pendulum> More information can be found at http://espeak.sourceforge.net/
  47 [18:26] <Pendulum> These are the two main text-to-speech/screen reader options in the Software Center
  48 [18:26] <Pendulum> Are there any questions about espeak or other questions about text-to-speech in Ubuntu?
  49 [18:27] <Pendulum> Moving on from text-to-speech, I'm going to very quickly cover magnification software
  50 [18:27] <Pendulum> The two bits of magnification software commonly found in Ubuntu are gnome-mag and the magnification part of Orca
  51 [18:28] <Pendulum> And that's about all I have there :P
  52 [18:29] <Pendulum> Next I want to talk about alternate keyboards.
  53 [18:30] <Pendulum> oh, before I move on AlanBell has mentioned in -classroom-chat that Compiz zoom is also pretty good for screen magnification
  54 [18:30] <Pendulum> anyway, alternate keyboards  are programs which can be used to replace or augment a traditional keyboard. They usually directly interface with the mouse however the mouse may be controlled.
  55 [18:30] <Pendulum> The built-in alternate keyboard for Ubuntu is onBoard.
  56 [18:31] <Pendulum> It was developed as a Google Summer of Code project several years ago and is a basic on screen keyboard.
  57 [18:31] <Pendulum> It includes everything except the function keys from a regular keyboard
  58 [18:32] <Pendulum> You click on the key or a sequence of keys and it inputs directly into whatever program you're working on
  59 [18:32] <Pendulum> Not only useful as assistive technology, it's rather useful for people using Ubuntu on a tablet
  60 [18:32] <Pendulum> (in fact, I find onBoard tedious to use with a mouse, but would probably be fine with it as a tablet)
  61 [18:33] <Pendulum> The other well known option for alternate keyboard capabilities is Dasher
  62 [18:33] <Pendulum> Which, for those of you who know me, I promise not to wax poetically about for the next 20 minutes ;-)
  63 [18:33] <Pendulum> Dasher, rather than having a keyboard set-up, is mouse controlled by hovering the mouse over the letters on the screen
  64 [18:33] <Pendulum> It also has predicitve text capabilities, which can be quite useful
  65 [18:34] <Pendulum> If you run Dasher from the Applications menu in Ubuntu, it prints the characters in its own text editor and you can copy and paste into other programs
  66 [18:34] <Pendulum> From the command line you can run " dasher -a direct " which allows direct input into other programs
  67 [18:35] <Pendulum> that said, direct input can be buggy and with GNOME's move to Dbus/at-spi2 this functionality will become slightly more complex. I'm not quite sure how it will work with Unity (or if it will work with Unity) yet
  68 [18:35] <Pendulum> There are also Windows and MacOS X versions of Dasher.
  69 [18:35] <Pendulum> For more information (including video and a way to try without downloading) you can go to http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/dasher/
  70 [18:35] <Pendulum> Are there any questions about alternate keyboards?
  71 [18:37] <Pendulum> Moving on...
  72 [18:37] <Pendulum> There are two programs in Ubuntu that help with alternate mouse controls
  73 [18:37] <Pendulum> MouseTrap allows headtracking using a webcam to control your mouse
  74 [18:37] <Pendulum> MouseTweaks works with the Assistive Technologies menu to give the ability to allow the mouse to "click" even if the mouse user can't actually make the motion that allows a mouse to click normally
  75 [18:38] <Pendulum> These should then work with whatever programs the user uses within the computer to control it (such as Dasher)
  76 [18:39] <Pendulum> And now the topic that everyone asks about (and is one of the things that got me involved with the accessibility team): Voice Recognition software
  77 [18:39] <Pendulum> The short answer is that there are hacks and there are programs that sort of work, but there aren't great results for voice recognition in Ubuntu
  78 [18:39] <Pendulum> The only voice recognition software in the Software Center is Julius (and it's not listed in the assistive technology section so you have to search for it and know it's there)
  79 [18:40] <Pendulum> (yes, I know I still need to file a bug about that ;) )
  80 [18:40] <Pendulum> Julius was originally developed in Japanese and is being ported to English
  81 [18:40] <Pendulum> Unfortunately, as it's not finished software, the documentation is lacking
  82 [18:40] <Pendulum> I've spent some time trying to figure out how to make it work in the past with no success, although I know others who've had slightly more success
  83 [18:40] <Pendulum> The other thing which has worked for some Ubuntu users is to run Dragon Natural Speaking under Wine
  84 [18:41] <Pendulum> I have been hearing good things about Simon-Listens which can be found in a PPA, however, it is really only meant to be voice control for the computer, not speech-to-text.
  85 [18:41] <Pendulum> Are there any questions about voice recognition?
  86 [18:42] <Pendulum> < hajour> is there not something from julius from microsoft ?
  87 [18:43] <Pendulum> I honestly don't know. I know that a lot of the open source work on voice recognition has in some way involved proprietary voice engines and libraries, but I don't know about Julius specifically
  88 [18:44] <Pendulum> Are there any other questions about voice recognition?
  89 [18:45] <Pendulum> Okay, those are the major groups of accessibility programs and what's availible in Ubuntu
  90 [18:45] <Pendulum> Now I'm going to talk about some of the accessibility-specific Ubuntu derivatives (or are related to accessibility)
  91 [18:46] <Pendulum> the biggest of these at the moment is Vinux, which is aimed and blind and visually impaired users.
  92 [18:46] <Pendulum> You can get more information at http://vinux.org.uk/
  93 [18:47] <Pendulum> Another one that's been discussed in the GNOME community quite a bit Guadalinux- a11y edition
  94 [18:47] <Pendulum> This is a Spanish-language derivative and the a11y edition was supposed to have its first release in November 2010, however, I can't find any information on whether it actually released or not (and I can't read Spanish to really look at the Guadalinux site to find it)
  95 [18:47] <Pendulum> Finally, we have Qimo4kids, which mhall119 developed partially as a way to create something that would be easy for kids with developmental disabilities to use
  96 [18:48] <Pendulum> Before I give the list of ways to get help with accessibility, I'd like to talk a little bit about how the future of accessibility development for Ubuntu is looking
  97 [18:49] <Pendulum> Right now Luke and several other people at Canonical are working to get the accessibility framework for Unity written and in
  98 [18:51] <ClassBot> There are 10 minutes remaining in the current session.
  99 [18:51] <Pendulum> There are also new projects being worked on such as SpeechControl, a community developed project that aims to provide a screen reader, and hopefully also voice control for Ubuntu
 100 [18:52] <Pendulum> Are there any questions about the derivatives or the future of accessibility?
 101 [18:53] <Pendulum> Okay, I'm going to end with where you can go to get help on accessibility related issues in Ubuntu
 102 [18:54] <Pendulum> https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Accessibility has the official documentation
 103 [18:54] <Pendulum> http://wiki.ubuntu.com/Accessibility is the wiki pages, these are slowly being updated
 104 [18:54] <Pendulum> The Accessibility section of Ubuntu Forums
 105 [18:54] <Pendulum> #ubuntu-accessibility here on freenode
 106 [18:55] <Pendulum> ubuntu-accessiblity@lists.ubuntu.com (to subscribe go to https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/Ubuntu-accessibility )
 107 [18:55] <Pendulum> the ubuntu accessibility team is http://wiki.ubuntu.com/Accessibility/Team and now http://ubuntuaccessibility.wordpress.com/
 108 [18:55] <Pendulum> The Gnome A11y team is also often useful: gnome-accessibility-list@gnome.org & http://projects.gnome.org/accessibility/
 109 [18:55] <Pendulum> Does anyone have any final questions?
 110 [18:56] <ClassBot> There are 5 minutes remaining in the current session.
 111 [18:56] <ClassBot> habeouscorpus asked: Are there any known bugs or incompatibilities with Orca?
 112 [18:58] <Pendulum> the biggest known bug recently has been the installer bug
 113 [18:58] <Pendulum> I have talked to people who have, however, found it fixed in the early teasting of Natty so hopefully it is fixed
 114 [18:58] <Pendulum> otherwise you can find the bugs by search for Orca on Launchpad
 115 [18:59] <Pendulum> Looks like we're out of time. If you have any other questions feel free to ask in #ubuntu-accessibility or on the mailing list
 116 [18:59] <Pendulum> Thanks everyone for coming to my session!
 117 [19:01] <pleia2> Thanks Pendulum!