On 21/06/07, Ian Pascoe <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> In fact here's a challenge for you all to do on those rainy evenings. Get
> Orca up and running - it's part of the Gnome desktop from 6.06 onwards -
> turn your monitors off, no cheating now, and have a go at doing some of your
> normal tasks to see what I mean.
Well that is an experience I certainly do NOT want to repeat.
Open Synaptic and installed gnome-orca, (ORCA seemed to have nothing
to do with screen reading, it does something with routers and SMTP I
think).
I typed "orca" in a terminal and it muttered something about Braille
and nothing happened.
I turned on assistive technology support in preferences and logged out
and logged back in again.
Checking preferences it said screen reader was unavailable (darn)
So I ran "orca" from a terminal. Huge mistake, catastrophic mistake,
one of the worst things I have ever done in Linux[0].
What did it do? Displayed a message about Braille, displayed some
trace backs for something that looked like python (something about get
voices failing).
And the froze, but not only did it freeze, it froze the terminal and
it froze all the commands. I could move my cursor but could not click
on anything. Well nuts to this I shall kill it,Ctrl-C in it's
terminal. Nothing, hmm Alt-F2 to get a command line, nope nothing. Ok
this looks serious time to break out the big guns Ctrl-Alt-F1 to get
me console access, wtf that's didn't work either.
Push the power button in a hope that at some level the kernel will see
it and perform a shutdown, nope, Push and hold and power the system
off.
Reboot, login and oddly Orca is started for me ands works, well I say
works but really I mean it does something. Move my cursor around and
hear a garbled voice. I can make out it says something about system
settings, as I had my monitor a notice that my cursor is on my System
menu.
Not wanting to cheat I turn the monitor off.
Right now to open FireFox, helpfully I have a shortcut to this on the
toolbar. I wave my mouse upwards and get the system menu again, right
a bit nothing, right a bit more, nothing until I get what sounds like
"terminal" Ah must be the terminal shortcut. Wave mouse around a bit
more I must be near, and for the life of me all I get is the system
menu description. NOT HELPFUL.
Stuff this, Alt-F2 it mutters something (I forget what) I hit 'f' it
says 'f', I hit 'i' it says 'f' (odd), hit 'r' 'e', it says 'fire' ah
makes sense, I boot up FireFox.
It says something I don't understand, then it says profile chooser, I hit enter.
Now It says Welcome to Ubuntu, or something similar and "HTML BOX" (or
similar), that's a fine description of the Ubuntu start page for you.
I try to find the URL bar with the tab key, nothing, nothing, toolbar,
ah close nothing, something I can't quite work out. type in gmails
address, it won't describe the page and hitting tab is not helping.
I give in. Turn screen on and it appears I typed the URL in the search
box. Oops.
Am I doing something wrong here?
Andy
[0] Other stupid things I have done i Linux:
1) Used ndiswrapper with an unsupported windows driver (hung the kernel)
2) wrote a kernel module for an arm system and did the IO access a bit
wrong, crashed the kernel.
--
Computers are like air conditioners. Both stop working, if you open windows.
-- Adam Heath
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