On Fri, Mar 28, 2008 at 2:51 PM, Willie Walker <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > Gnome-mag: > > - Just does magnification. > > It does more, such as various forms of color filtering. Thanks to work > from Rich and Joanie for GNOME 2.22, Orca has a lot more support for > various useful gnome-mag features. The Orca WIKI has a write up of the > various features available today: > > http://live.gnome.org/Orca/ConfigurationGui
Ok, I see. > > That leaves us with a gnome-mag which, in it's current state, would be > > by and large useless due to performance issues. > > Based upon our experiences with real end users at CSUN, it's actually > quite a usable solution. Some users commented that it's even better > than some of the more popular Windows solutions. Ok, this is a lot better than I feared. I was under the impression from my own brief experiences that just enabling a composite window manager would turn gnome-mag into a horrible resource hog, I'm glad that's not the case. > At the same time, we want to consider other important things, such as > the ability to highlight areas of the screen and/or do other important > transforms to benefit a larger population of users (e.g., users with > learning disabilities). I remember we talked about this. I can certainly accommodate most, if not all of these ideas within Compiz plugins. > So....take a look at the two URLs above. If you're interested, please > submit a proposal for the GNOME Outreach task. My guess is that you're > probably one of the better people in the world to do it. :-) I've read the posts a few times and am very much interested in this task. My goals would be: 1. Create a dbus-based communication protocol to accommodate things like text-caret-moved and highlighting. Implement it in Orca and Compiz. 2. Give Orca the ability to directly configure the accessibility parts of a composite (window) manager with minimum visual changes to the current UI. 3. Mirror the functionality gnome-mag has into Compiz. For example the split-screen magnification and cross hair functions. The first point should be pretty straight forward. As for closer composite manager and Orca integration, my idea was to retain the magnification UI in Orca almost exactly as it is, but when compiz is running, have the options affect Compiz. This obviously depends somewhat on the last point, since Compiz currently isn't able to highlight or draw a cross hair. The API would be designed to configure any magnification tool over D-Bus (not just Compiz). This could be combined with the sending of events (highlighting, text-caret-moved) into one API. This API could also make the features discoverable, allowing a composite manager to only support a sub set of the features defined in the API. The Orca UI could then gray out the disable features, or otherwise make it obvious that they are not available. Ideally gnome-mag should transitions to this API too, but it might be simpler for now to just have Orca magically switch between gnome-mag mode and "everything else mode" in the background. Given the state of gnome-mag, that has obvious advantages. As you may notice, I focus very little on Metacity. I simply don't know the state of Metacity or how acceptable or difficult it would be to implement the required changes. I assume it would be quite a lot of work. Would this be a requirement of the Outreach task, or is it acceptable to focus on the actual API and use Compiz for the initial implementation? - Kristian _______________________________________________ gnome-accessibility-list mailing list gnome-accessibility-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/gnome-accessibility-list
