List,
I'm an old speakup user who makes my living making accessible software
for the blind for Windows and Mac. Recently I decided to see how well I
could port my stack, primarily Python-based, over to a modern Debian
machine to determine if it would be worthwhile to cut releases for all
three platforms.
Installation was fairly seamless, especially compared to the old Speakup
+ Braille N' Speak + Slackware days. I was able to install to a VMWare 9
virtual machine without any difficulty, someone has really gotten their
act together when it comes to initial installation, especially with this
fancy shmancy software speech.
I performed a standard install, partitioned, selected packages, so on
and so forth. I selected to install package categories 1, 3, 8, and
10... Debian Desktop environment, print server, ssh server and system
utilities or whatever they're called. Basically the defaults.
There was a time after selecting these categories that I received no
feedback, and a less patient user may have terminated the process, but
after waiting a good 15 minutes it gave me a percentage indicator.
Installation was finally complete. I rebooted the vm, and wonder of
wonders the thing came up blabbering at me! It took me a second to
realize I needed to switch to the first TTY and whack numpad enter, but
I soon made it shut up.
I hit alt+f7 again to return to the gdm login window. I selected my user
and was greeted with a password field. "Quite reasonable," I thought,
while typing my password. "This Linux accessibility thing has gotten a
lot better!"
I pressed Return, waited a few seconds, and was greeted with the
"Welcome to Orca message"
Then...
...Nothing
I waited.
Still nothing
I waited some more. About 5 minutes since initial login. Still no speech.
Hm. Okay, this is why I'm on a VM! So I popped out of the VM, fired up
ssh and logged in to my new machine to see if I could see what the heck
was going on.
But wait! I have no idea where orca sticks logs, if it even uses syslog,
or anything! What can I do?
Well, I thought, perhaps Orca has somehow scuffed itself up and all I
need do is restart it. So I issued killall orca from the shell. I
reactivated my VM, hit alt+f2, typed orca, and wonder of wonders it came
up for real this time!
This ... is a problem. A huge, ugly disgusting problem that I hope can
be rectified very hastily.
I'm a Gnu/Linux user for more than a decade and more than ready to get
in and monkey with stuff. But there is absolutely no excuse for having
the first-run experience of a new user include switching shells,
followed by killing their screen reader, followed by switching back and
restarting it. This is absurd and untenable.
You literally cannot have a more standard installation experience. I did
nothing outside the norm, instead accepting all the defaults.
I am somewhat frustrated. To me, myself a software developer, this
experience points strongly at a culture which does not test or otherwise
provide quality assurance for the code they produce. Surely a few people
at least tried to do bare-metal installs on virtual machines at least
for testing purposes? Let alone any actual unit/integration tests.
Whatever the case, I strongly hope that this can be sorted out. As it
stands, the best way I could describe it is shameful, jarringly so after
the nearly-perfect installation experience.
I welcome your thoughts on this, and offer myself and some of my time
for trying to come up with and implement a solution.
Thanks for your time,
-Q
--
-Q
http://q-continuum.net
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