[access-uk] Re: linux for the blind
- From: "James & Nash" <james.austin1984@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: access-uk@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Fri, 29 Jan 2010 12:03:46 +0000
I'm glad Vinux wokred well for you. I have not eyt tried Vinux, but I've got to
agree with you about Ubuntu 8.10. I think too that the new Ubuntu will be a
Long Term Release too, so the support should be a bit better.
I am not sure that Linux is ready for everyday use by the mases - blind or
otherwise. This is simply because there is so much fiddling needed to make
things work. I do like knowing how something works and I don't mind playing
around and customising to my little heart's content, but sometimes, I do just
like my computer to work.
TC
James, Lyn, Nash & Twinny
On 29 Jan 2010, at 07:04, Isaac Porat wrote:
> Hi James
>
> I follow all the relevant mailing lists, tried the various fixes and Ubuntu
> Karmic did not work for me and I know for a fact for others, some of this
> fixes repair something and cause problems somewhere else. There are some
> patches developed to get PulseAudio to be more responsive which improves
> things and these will be implemented in the next version of Ubuntu Lucid
> which will come out in April. From those who use the alpha, these measures
> were not implemented yet anyway this is for the future.
>
> From my experience, I cannot recommend the latest Ubuntu Karmic. I can
> however recommend the previous one Jaunty which worked pretty well for me
> and includes Open Office 3 and Thunderbird 3.
> In theory it should work out of the box if one knows which keys to press but
> this never worked for me but if one know his way around the system as you
> know getting it to speak is not too difficult. So for real out of the box
> experience Vinux for me always worked best.
>
> Regards
> Isaac
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: access-uk@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:access-uk@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of
> James & Nash
> Sent: 29 January 2010 01:43
> To: access-uk@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
> Subject: [access-uk] Re: linux for the blind
>
> Hi Issac
>
> I think a number of the problems you might have found in Ubuntu were due to
> the way speech was handled by Pulseaudio and the fact that it wasn't very
> well integrated into the Linux kernel. There are work arounds on the
> following site if you are interested though:
>
> http://www.live.gnome.org/Orca
>
> Also, I found that when I used the latest version of Ubuntu, I think it is
> 9.10, that by default the special video effects were enabled, which meant
> that certain features were not accessible to Orca. These should be turned
> off, then things become a lot easier, although I think you will still need
> to use the command line to access Administrative applications and perform
> Admin tasks.
>
>
> TC
> James, Lyn, Nash & Twinny
> On 29 Jan 2010, at 00:13, Isaac Porat wrote:
>
>> Hi
>>
>> Regarding Vinux, it is working very well out of the box you can get
>> the virtual edition which you can get going under Windows in minutes.
>> By default (like NVDA) it uses espeak which I actually like a lot.
>> If you want to learn to use Linux Vinux is very good and the support
>> on the mailing list is excellent too. The drawback with Vinux is that
>> it is based on Debian Lenny which uses gnome 2.22 (the desktop) which
>> is fairly old (the current gnome version is 2.28) and there have been
>> substantial accessibility improvements since; since 2.26 you can use
>> Open Office 3 and Thunderbird 3 which are a lot more accessible than
>> earlier versions. So if you want to do some real work with Vinux GUI,
>> you are probably better wait until the next version which will
>> probably come out sometimes in April, will be based on Debian Squeeze and
> will have the latest gnome 2.28.
>>
>> Your other option is Ubuntu. The latest called Karmic (gnome 2.28)
>> never worked for me having issues of slow speech etc but the version
>> before called Jaunty (gnome 2.26) is very good and you can be
>> productive with it - be prepared for a steep learning curve with Linux.
>>
>> Regards
>> Isaac
>>
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: access-uk@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:access-uk@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On
>> Behalf Of ari
>> Sent: 28 January 2010 14:10
>> To: access-uk@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
>> Subject: [access-uk] linux for the blind
>>
>> Hi all
>> Is it worth trying to use Vinux? What can a person do with it, like
>> can you use the Office and browse yet? I remember a few years ago I
>> was excited about trying linux, and someone helped me partition my
>> harddrive and install Red Hat with a screen reader called Gnopernicus,
>> and then after that another one called Orca, but, first the voices
>> were really rubbish, and second you couldn't hardly do anything. It
>> was so pathetic that we couldn't even get Gnopernicus to read it's own
>> manual in the web browser. I just gave up on linux after that, but am
> curious to look at it again.
>> Thanks
>> Ari
>>
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