Orca does not speak

Linux for blind general discussion blinux-list at redhat.com
Tue Jan 15 16:48:57 UTC 2019


I actually hold a BS in Computer Science, though I confess none of my
classes ever went into much detail regarding process IDs, not even the
ones that dealt with Linux(granted, even the Linux-heavy classes
seemed designed for students coming from a Windows background, and by
the time I finished my general education studies and started focusing
on my major, I had been a full-time Linux user for a few years.

That said, while I can understand the reasoning, and might could even
agree it's the most reasonable choice from an internal, developer
facing perspective, I've been mostly approaching this discussion from
an external, end-user perspective, the explanation requires delving
into what should arguably be a black box from the end-user's side, and
if the wording confuses people who are likely well-above average in
being technologically literate, I feel bad for those who are learning
to use Linux or a computer for the first time.

I won't begrudge a developer, not even a FOSS developer, for
optimizing their code for their own readibility and workflow,
especially when they expect few external contributions even if they
optimize for general readability, but I do think UI should strive for
minimizing the amount of technical knowledge the end user needs in
order to understand how to operate the software, especially for
something with as general use as a screen reader.

But meh, I feel like both sides are repeating themselves, neither is
likely to change their opinion, and it's not likely I or anyone else
will make a personal fork of orca to change a pair of two-character
substrings in a single long switch. Wasn't even aware Orca had a
command-line interface prior to this thread and I usually just fix
issues with orca by either closing Firefox, which given my setup
triggers termination of orca and my x-session, or if that fails,
rebooting the computer, which is usually sufficient to fix minor
problems or point out problems big enough to restore a backup of my
root partition(though admittedly, that latter definitely isn't
something I'd expect a beginner to be able to do and I manage such
through bash scripts that save me from having to memorize the cryptic
syntax of partimage).




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