orca not so hot?

[$am]

I'm blind, and my friend is always going on about how great open source is, so I've tried Ubuntu a number of times. From what I know, Ubuntu, and also GNOME, push themselves as having accessibility in mind. However, I've tried Ubuntu (and Kubuntu) and haven't been impressed with their accessibility features. In spite of reviews claiming that Orca would soon surpass JAWS in terms of overall quality, my experience has been just the opposite. Orca seems buggy, and the magnifier is slow, not to mention the occasional missing portions of the screen when in full screen mode.

As for the screen reader itself, it handles webpages very poorly. Rather than reading webpages according to the DOM, it seems to read the text straight through, without regard to tables or other formatting. Another issue is eSpeak. Every single voice sounds like it has a British accent, even the american english voice. Also, the 'flat review' thing, whatever that is, which seems to be taking a cue from the voice-over cursor in OSX, is something I just can't get the hang of.

Lest you think I simply came on here to bash Ubuntu or open source. I want to know, is all of this just a result of my inexperience? After all, I got used to voice over after using JAWS, and now I like voice over better. I really really want to get into open source software, but the lack of stable, reliable, robust accessibility compared to retail software is a serious barrier. Putting aside Orca, Ubuntu and it's derivatives are obviously quality software. However, me dealing with orca is like a sighted person dealing with a monitor that simply goes dark, or flickers, or is missing 3/4 of the screen. It just won't work. If you can't see it, you can't fix it.

So help me out, is Ubuntu right for me? I really want it to be.

[$am]

Am I some kind of leper? Why hasn't anyone responded.

I think Ubuntu and Gnome have something to answer for if they push their accessibility and all I get is a buggy screen reader / magnifier with poor documentation.

But I want to know, is it all me?
Am I doing something wrong?

I had really hoped that ubuntu would let me stop paying the blind tax for JAWS.

[Dayofswords]

i have yet to figure out how to use orca
i think its not as good as other programs is due to its lack of real use compared to others so development may be slowed

[RKCole]

Sam,

First, please do not take anything which will be said hereafter as to be harsh or demeaning. I have no intention whatsoever of taking such a stand as that. If anything written hereafter sounds like this sort of attitude, please forgive me as I have no intention of that whatsoever.

I started out (it does not seem so long ago) around five years ago using Ubuntu. I was tired of the "blind tax" you mentioned when it came to commercial software.

Back then when Ubuntu was at it's 5.10 release (Breezy Badger), I could hardly use it because of the lack of a decent magnifier. GNOME and Ubuntu do talk of accessibility quite a bit, and as far as Linux distributions, Ubuntu has been the best for me. I have very limited vision, and I have wanted to use a screen reader for some time, but I had problems learning Orca. Nevertheless, the accessibility of Ubuntu/GNOME has indeed come a LONG way since I began tinkering with Ubuntu. Since June of 2007, I have replaced Windows altogether and use Ubuntu solely with the eZoom plugin feature of the Compiz window manager. From my lack of experience with the details, I don't think it has focus tracking (it may), but I never used that with ZoomText or other screen magnifiers. I just needed a simple magnifier so that I could see my screen. Compiz eZoom plugin is great!! It is smooth; it hardly uses any RAM whatsoever. I love it!! However, your needs may differ from mine.

The thing is, though, that commercial companies such as AI Squared and Freedom Scientific are not necessarily out there "for" the visually impaired community as they may say they are. This was one of my greatest frustrations with these companies--I was attending a college in Ohio in 2004. I NEEDED a screen magnifier--a good one. I was, and unfortunately still am, living on SSI Disability here in the U.S. I contacted AI Squared to ask them if there was anything I could do to afford ZoomText.
"Can you afford $50 a month?" This was their help.
"No," I told them, "Unfortunately, that is far beyond my budget."
"Well, that is all we can do. The only other way you can get a copy is if you get a government agency to purchase it for you through a particular program."

Until I had help, I had to use the windows magnifier program for my school work...That is when I learned that they just really did not care; all that mattered was if they could get another $700 or so for a product.

Although I have not been as active in the accessibility community here, I still use Ubuntu. There are a LOT of great minds at work in enhancing accessibility for Ubuntu. Many of them get little or no pay. they just do it...because they care. There is not one day which goes by that I do not have gratitude for their work. These folks may not have the financial backing like the commercial companies do (who only seem to develop for a certain platform of operating system), but their HEART is in the work.

Please, do not give up on it yet. If you look at posts of mine in the past in this form you may see my despair. There were times in which I wanted to just give up on Ubuntu/Linux. I am here today to say that I am glad I didn't. There is a community of people here who truly do care, and who are doing their best to make Ubuntu an accessible distribution. I know that in the future these open source products will ultimately surpass the commercial applications.

I know that I did not necessarily give a solution to your question, but I know where you are at. I was there, too. Just please don't give up yet.

If there is anything that I can do to help you, please let me know.

[Gene_J]

I have two completely blind friends I am trying to help set up with Ubuntu. They are used to JAWS in Windows and I have been unable to get ORCA even close to working for them. I hope that some time soon a program at least as good as JAWS becomes available for linux users. Currently, we are stuck at the great divide. I am sighted and do everything I can with the GUI and they, being blind, do everything with keyboard shortcuts and CLI. This is a major impasse that I hope a good voice program can help us remove.

[ronnielsen1]

I'm not sure if it's any good or not. I downloaded it and tried it out in virtualbox. The sound worked but I had a black screen. I have not tried it out as a live cd yet
http://www.unixmen.com/news-today/1016-vinux-a-talking-linux-distro-for-blind-and-visually-impaired-users
Vinux (http://vinux.org.uk/screenshots.html) is a remastered version of the popular Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx distribution optimised for the needs of blind and partially sighted users.. It provides three screen readers, two full-screen magnifiers (http://www.unixmen.com/news-today/1016-vinux-a-talking-linux-distro-for-blind-and-visually-impaired-users#), global font-size and colour http://distrowatch.com/himdcxeyz/oebitb/vinux.pngchanging facilities, and out-of-the-box support for USB Braille displays. The Vinux live CD boots into the Orca screen reader which makes it easy to navigate the graphical GNOME desktop using keybindings. For those who prefer to work in a simple text-based consolehttp://images.intellitxt.com/ast/adTypes/2_bing.gif (http://www.unixmen.com/news-today/1016-vinux-a-talking-linux-distro-for-blind-and-visually-impaired-users#) there is the Speakup

[biloyp]

I downloaded and ran Vinux (ubuntu distro for handicapped or normal people....) anyways, I ran from the LIVECD and besides the very robotic voice it does work pretty well. It uses ORCA which is really configurable. I think it (like all new things) would take some getting use to but hey , it is free and works pretty well, reads menus, desktop, mouse over buttons and even web pages. When and if I install it, I can offer a better review.

[Edu Camargo]

Ok, I gotta tell you.

I have a laptop which I won as a birthday present, and just decided to test Ubuntu on it. Yes, the change seems very scary, but really, I'm enjoying the ride a lot. Of course, certain things needs some atention like the integration with Firefox that turns things a bit slow in certain pages, access to some objects and such. But as someone said here, there's always someone behind it who's putting the heart on this project, something that on the Windows side just started to happen again with the NVDA's arrival. By the way, I have a Windows box (still XP), and my primary screen reader is NVDA, another open-source project that you can even plug via USB in your friend's computer and use for external commitments.

I've been also through certain stages in my life where I wanted to give up on Ubuntu, but when Ubuntu 10.04 came around I was like: I have to give this a chance. Today I'm taking some amount of time to understand some principals, like installing applications from source, the diference amongst libraries, and also I'm almost familiarizing myself with the Unix concept, with intentions to go between Mac and Linux. I'm using Orca 2.31. And it's runnin' pretty well, thanks.

On the Orca mailing list there are a lot of people discussing and giving their contributions for the advance of the project.

So do you think I've used JAWS for a long time as a legal user? No baby, JAWS always took a space on my machines pretty wel cracked. Simply because access to information is a right, not a privilege. Not even Micro$oft, with many talks about accessibility took some direction to make things work, bundling with their system a screen reader that if it has two key bindings, it has too much. Apple took their time and realized about the difaculties a blind windows user goes through, and after a loooooooooong time since the Mac's existance, built a screen reader into their tigers and leopards. Today VoiceOver is one of the most aclaimed in terms of accessibility, and you can check out via macvisionaries.com.

I understand your point but I think that with the course of the road, Orca deserves our support and we still have to push the developers to work. Because nothing is more valuable than having a computer which allows us to access all the information we need, and legally saving our investments. And also, having the freedom to choose how do we want our computer to bee or look like, without being treated as fools by companies that try to push what they think it's good for us.

So we have to thank the people at Sun/Oracle and the comunity, and also the people at Ubuntu comunity for giving us the alternative. I'm so thankfull for taking the time to learn the system, and discovering a lot of ways to aproach the things I want.

As someone said here, keep diggin' with it. They deserve our support.

Peace,

Edu Camargo.

[pietpaardebloem]

Did noy try it yet but this may be interesting, linux for the visualy impaired


http://vinux.org.uk/

[LewRockwellFAN]

My interest in text to speech is just for fun, not necessity, but I've played with it a fair amount. Bluntly, Orca just sucks. There is another thread on here ( http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=462037 ) in which several better text to speech solutions are discussed.

As for the magnifier it is pretty bad too. Try Kmag instead. If more aps respected the system settings for fonts and allowed for the effect of different font settings in designing their gui a lot of us wouldn't need the magnifier so often. Usually I just put my naked eyeball 1 inch from the bloody monitor to make out those size 2 fonts cause I'm nearsighted as heck.

[factorialpython]

YES I AGREE THAT oRCA IS GETTING THERE, but I NEED I SCREEN READER AS GOOD AS jAWS, I DO USE LINUX AS MY MAIN pc SO WOULD LIKE TO INSTAL IT VIA wine BUT SO FAR DO NOT HAVE A CLUE HOW to do it, any suggestions would be most welcome. the reason for JAWS been using it since 3.5 and i am so familiar with it, and it sounds and works great.

[RCC2k7]

OK, lets put things into perspective shall we?

It's easy to blame the commercial AT companies for not caring about the visually impaired just to suck money out of us. But keep in mind the developers and testers of JAWS, ZoomText and similar commercial products not only have to care about the software they are developing but they need to be concerned with how their product interacts with the operating systems as well as many mainstream applications. All those developing and testing efforts take time and money, after all they do work on that for a living you know. This is unfortunately why those programs can't be had for cheap, although I do wish they were more affordable.

But that is precisely the reason why you cannot expect open source AT software to match the quality of commercial software. There's a lot of time and money that is needed to test a product like Orca, and to test it interacts well with the operating system and third-party applications. Resources are limited when many of these developers work on their free time because there isn't enough money to be made on a free open source product to make a living.

All this said, I do think Orca sucks, because there have been many years and it struggles with basic stuff. The magnifier became less useful in the past two years, to the point it is non-existent in Ubuntu 11.10. eSpeak makes me want to puke, and though I don't think we should expect NeoSpeech or RealSpeak quality from an open source engine, at least by now it should've learned to pronounce better in other languages and in non-British English. Speech alternatives are limited. There's PicoTTS which is the speech engine from Android yet making it work in Ubuntu is a challenge for the non-developer user who's not sight-impaired let alone to the visually-impaired. The AT-SPI or whatever the GNOME accessibility bridge is called, is awful; it slows down operations and brings some apps to a crash or a lockup. Have you tried to use the Ubuntu Software Center with Orca lately? Nothing has been done to fix the accessibility bridge, or whatever has been done it hasn't worked at all!

Basically, for a visually-impaired user on a tight budget, I think Windows 7 with its Aero magnifier and the NVDA open source screen reader is still a better fit than any Linux distro. Linux is just not usable enough for a daily driver, although it's nice to have as a hobby.

EDIT: I tried to write this post in Ubuntu, but having no magnifier and with Orca being such a pain to switch languages, I ended up rebooting into Windows 7 so I could write this comfortably. Seriously, Ubuntu isn't ready for "accessible primetime".

[jonathonblake]

All those developing and testing efforts take time and money,

What testing? Have you used JAWS 13 with MIE on WinXP?


But that is precisely the reason why you cannot expect open source AT software to match the quality of commercial software.

Going by code metrics, the quality of commercial software is slightly less than the quality of FLOSS. However, in both instances, those metrics are all over the place.

It much easier to adapt FLOSS to one's specific requirements, than it is to adapt commercial software to one's specific requirements.



Resources are limited when many of these developers work on their free time because there isn't enough money to be made on a free open source product to make a living.

Red Hat is one company that proves that all of the points in that claims are completely false.

and though I don't think we should expect NeoSpeech or RealSpeak quality from an open source engine,

The issue here is quite simple. The USPTO has violated US Constitutional Law, US Statute Law, US Case Law, and USPTO Rules and Regulations in granting non-patents on mathematical algorithms that are critical in creating viable speech engines.

IOW, you need to fire your current political representatives, and hire one/two/three that going to either force the various federal agencies to adhere to the law of the land, or else dismantle them completely, on the grounds that no agency is better than one that breaks the laws of the land every minute of every day.

The other option is to hire a president who thinks of patent reform as being the termination of the practice of granting patents in violation of US Constitutional Law, US Statute Law, US Case Law, and USPTO Rules and Regulations.

it should have learned to pronounce better in other languages and in non-British English.

This gets back to those mathematical algorithms that the USPTO has granted in violation of the laws of the land.

jonathon

[RKCole]

Very good information, jonathonblake.

I am simply amazed with how far Orca has come along. I remember using Gnopernicus back in 2005, and I felt like Linux (something I so desired to use) was out of my each. Because of community and developer testing, it is my sole operating system of choice.

The Orca development team works hard to produce a great product, and they listen to their users. They are not solely motivated in an annual salary, but rather the improvement of a great and promising technology.

As saddening as your statements about the USPTO are, jonathonblake, they are correct.

Once again, thanks for that information.