Orca | Thoughts of a Dragon

Posts Tagged ‘Orca’

Please Help Protect Accessibility

Sunday, February 7th, 2010

Now here’s a talking watch worth having. Alarms stopwatch, and more.
Kapsys is an innovative mobile navigation system principally based on satellite geo-location (GPS) and vocal interaction (speech synthesis and voice recognition).
This handy Bausch & Lomb Folding Pocket Magnifier makes it easy to read on the go.

Oracle has, in their infinite, "wisdom" laid off the leader of the Gnome accessibility project leader, not to mention the lead developer of Orca. This is a horrific blow to the blind community, especially those who use the Orca screen reader. This move by Oracle was unexpected because in the past they have at least pretended to care about accessibility. I must say that Sun Micro Systems was a great company, I know it will take a lot for Oracle to live up to our expectations, but for them to just abandon Orca like that is ill tidings for the future. What will happen to the accessibility of other products now owned by Oracle? Will Open Office no longer be accessible to the blind? Once the avalanche begins, where will it end? If you, dear reader, care about accessibility I urge you to please take what action you can. Leave a comment here, contact companies, let everyone know that accessibility is important and needs to be taken seriously. Even if you do not use Orca or Linux it still is important to you. Perhaps other companies are watching to see how the blind community responds to this situation. Maybe if this battle is lost it could be the beginning of losing the war. Let your voice be heard. Maybe we can reach them with out resulting to Billboards.
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Tags: accessibility, Oracle, Orca, Sun
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The Sendspace Wizard with Orca

Thursday, June 11th, 2009

Can you sink their Battleship? Find out with this Braille version of the classic game.
Kapsys is an innovative mobile navigation system principally based on satellite geo-location (GPS) and vocal interaction (speech synthesis and voice recognition).
This handy Bausch & Lomb Folding Pocket Magnifier makes it easy to read on the go.

A couple of months ago I found out about a service called Sendspace.
It is a great service that allows you to upload files and send links to them by email. You can also use the links on your blog or website if you have limited space or if your host doesn’t allow files to be uploaded. One of the things that makes Sendspace great is the Wizard. Instead of navigating through the Sendspace website to upload or download files, you can install the Wizard and use it instead. It is a very convenient piece of software for Linux, Mac, and Windows. I downloaded the Wizard shortly after creating my account. When I opened the Wizard for the first time, it was almost completely accessible with Orca. There was one exception though, and that one problem prevented me from being able to use the Wizard at all. The local and remote file views are displayed on something that Orca just refers to as panels. I noticed a “send feedback” option in the Wizard’s help menu and selected it. I was taken to the Sendspace website where I filled some information into a form and explained the problem I was having. I had also noticed that two of the keyboard shortcuts used by the Wizard conflicted with shortcuts used by Gnome, so I included that in the message as well.
I have contacted several companies in the past requesting accessibility improvements, or a Linux version of their software. In the past I have met with very little success for my efforts. Usually, after a week or two, the company would respond with some variant of “no”. This was not the case with Sendspace. I received a reply from them almost immediately. The message said that they would begin work on fixing the problems I had described. They were as good as their word too. I even got updates about the progress being made. Last week, the new version for Linux was released. It was slightly behind the Windows version, I suspect because of the problems with getting Orca to read info in those panels. When the new version came out though, it was usable with Orca. It now has a general file selection dialog that Orca can read as well as the panels. The keyboard shortcuts were even fixed. I am really impressed with how fast they responded to and fixed the accessibility issue I reported. It is great to know that a company is dedicated to providing their software to anyone who wants to use it regardless of platform or disability. In fact, Mike, a Sendspace Representative says, "We’ve been committed to accessibility ever since we found out about it and we’ve been improving it slowly but surely since then (on all three platforms, mac, windows and Linux)."
So, if you need to send files that are too large for email attachments or need to host files for your blog or website, get your free Sendspace. account today. Tell your friends and family. When a company s dedicated and responds to accessibility requests as fast as Sendspace, they deserve all the support and promotion we can give them. Honestly, I can’t say enough good things about this company. Thanks to the Wizard developers for all of your hard work.

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Tags: accessible file upload software, Orca, sendspace
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Keyboard Shortcuts

Thursday, February 5th, 2009

Keeping in touch with friends and family just got even easier with the Emerson Big Button Photo Phone.
Can you sink their Battleship? Find out with this Braille version of the classic game.
This talking calculator is also an alarm clock. More importantly, it has optional headphones. Great for class.

Sometimes in Ubuntu, you will want to create global keyboard shortcuts that aren’t possible in the keyboard preferences in the system menu. There are a couple of ways to do this, but probably the easiest is a program called xbindkeys. To get it, open terminal and type:
sudo apt-get install xbindkeys xbindkeys-config
If you are using Orca, the screen reader, you don’t need to get xbindkeys-config because Orca doesn’t work with it.
The first thing to do after the program is installed is type:
xbindkeys –defaults > ~/.xbindkeysrc
This basically creates the initial settings for xbindkeys in the file called .xbindkeysrc
After that is done, type:
xbindkeys
this command starts the xbindkeys daemon. In order to have it start at login, go to system, preferences, session. On the additional programs tab click add then type xbindkeys in both the name and command boxes. Click add then click close and it will start automatically on login.
To create a keyboard shortcut, you can launch the gui, called xbindkeys-config, by pressing alt-f2 to open the run dialog and type:
xbindkeys-config
For Orca user, the process is a bit different. Because xbindkeys-config doesn’t work with Orca, you will need to open the .xbindkeysrc file and edit it directly. To do this, in your home directory, type:
gedit .xbindkeysrc
This will open the file in text editor. Once that is done, use the control-end keys to quickly navigate to the bottom of the file. Move up 3 lines. The bottom 3 lines are basically just a fancy ending for the file. On a blank line above the three bottom lines, you can type in your keyboard shortcut. This consists of two lines. The first is the command you want the keyboard shortcut to execute. To launch orca, for example, you would type the word orca surrounded by quotes:
"orca"
On the second line comes the actual shortcut. In our example, we shall use control plus alt plus o as the shortcut. So, to put it altogether:
"orca"
control+alt + o
Press control-s to save the file and close gedit. Now, control-alt-o will launch orca. This can be done for any program you choose. It works on Kubuntu, Ubuntu, and Xubuntu.