[Fedora-livecd-list] Taking 6.93 for an A11y test drive

[David Zeuthen]

Hi Janina,

> The iso is downloading as I write. My intention is to see if I can run
> using Festival and the builtin Orca screen reader.
> 
> I understand David has made GDM accessible. What do I do to start speech
> for GDM Login? Is it Ctrl-S for 5 seconds?

Yeah, Ctrl+s for one second or longer. Btw, if your computer have a PC
speaker (most do), gdm will emit a beep when it's loaded. This is a
convenient hint when to press Ctrl+s since it will take a minute or two
to get to gdm at all.

When orca starts it should start speaking "Welcome to Orca". Then you
should be able to tab to the user list and Orca should read the user
names - I think there's still one bug where the list don't receive focus
immediately so maybe you have to press down when in the user list.

Alt+L will bring up a language list menu. Alt+T will bring up an options
menu. Both of these menus should be accessible. It's unfortunately not
possible to tab to them because it's not pure GTK+.

When you log in, the same AT's you enabled in the login screen will be
started in the session as well.

> And, what login should I use?

The login is 'fedora'.

> Sorry for the fundamental questions--but I'm not finding even basic
> documentation. Perhaps I'm not looking in the right place?

It's definitely something we need in the release notes; it's not exactly
as discoverable as I'd like.

FWIW, I'm not yet entirely satisfied with how accessibility works in
Fedora. The plan for Fedora 8 includes using the plain greeter which
have much better accessibility as it's using standard GTK+ widgets
instead of GnomeCanvas (we can still make it look pretty by using
standard GTK+ theming facilities). It's worth noting, AFAIK, that
Solaris does this for accessibility reasons.

In closing, accessibility is something we want to work very well in
Fedora including Live CD and accessible installs (don't think the
installer is not accessible in Fedora 7.. but it's using GTK+ so it's
definitely fixable). 

Feedback, good and bad, is very welcome! Many thanks!

     David