Accessibility Evaluation: Yelp GNOME Help Browser

During last few months Yelp Gnome help viewer had few hiccups. The ever vigilant users quickly posted "Yelp in Ubuntu Lucid is currently not accessible" messages to various mailing-lists. I am quite happy to report that Yelp (2.29.5.x) is now fully accessible with gnome orca screen reader once again. The accessibility testing was done on Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid with Orca screen reader (2.30.0pre) and Accerciser.

You will find few accessibility and usability suggestions from the evaluation listed below. Willie Walker and Shaun McCance helped by offering sage advice on Gnome #a11y IRC channel and Gnome Bugzilla. You can track these issues by subscribing to bugs.

Click image for full size

• Show Previous page in history button inaccessible (bgo #613265)
• Navigation Links provide additional information (bgo #613262)
• Reverse tabbing fails in search bar(bgo #613301)
• Side bar and other information boxes (bgo #613267)
• Alternative Home Link Location (bgo #613300)

Please do let me know if you find more issues with Yelp. I'll promise to look at them once I return from the easter vacation.

Dots braille editor for Linux

Dots is braille typesetting program for gnu/Linux, it can translate XML and MS DOC files and displays it both ASCII and braille dot notation. Dots is in very early stage of development and not as feature rich as commercial braille editors like WinBraille and Duxbury DBT.

The Dots braille editor is available on Debian Sid and Ubuntu Lucid, however it has loads of bugs. I patched few bugs and managed to get it working and save the translated document in .brl format. (see LP: #541721). You can view the screenshots of the program in action below.

Skype Video Chat on Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx

Took a short break from Ubuntu accessibility work to try out the Skype 2.1.0.81 beta on Ubuntu 10.04 (Lucid Lynx).

We used the Static build of Skype client on my Ubuntu Lucid laptop, while Kaprie Kanu used Ubuntu Jaunty laptop across the room. Downloaded and extracted the compressed archive to /opt/skype-version location on both the computers.

First I faced few issues with my external web camera (see LP #502866). Starting skype with following command fixed this issue. LD_PRELOAD=/usr/lib/libv4l/v4l1compat.so /opt/skype-2.1.0.81/skype

And the results are good, text chat and Video chat works well. There is slight video distortion (green lines at the bottom of video frame). File transfers are quick and Desktop sharing, a new features in this version works out of the box.

You can use Desktop sharing for making online presentations with Ubuntu. If you need sound events from the computer to be streamed as well, unplug the headphone and use the external speakers.

Skype Desktop Sharing

Espeak Klatt voices in Ubuntu Lucid

The next version of Ubuntu 10.04 (Lucid Lynx) ships with espeak version 1.43. This new release of espeak has the klatt voices that's everyone is talking about.

In December 2009 I first read about the Klatt voices in a post on NVDA mailing list. After some initial testing, I filed a Ubuntu bug report(LP: #510182) requesting to include this version into Ubuntu. Eddie Hung build Espeak packages for testing on Ubuntu Lucid development release.

Meanwhile Luke Yelavich mentioned that we can't include unstable software releases and I wrote to espeak developer Jonathan Duddington to make a stable release just in time before the lucid code freeze. Luke and Jonathan managed resolve the technical problems, thanks to them you can now try out the espeak voice variants. Give it a try!

espeak -v 'en-us+klatt2' "This is espeak test"

Storm dargon responded to my email request to provide the steps to enable the klatt2 voice for US english. Here is how you enable them to use with orca screen reader.

cd /usr/share/espeak-data/voices/en/ cp en-us en-us.bak sudo gedit en-us #move to the end of the file press enter and type: klatt 2 #save the file and exit. Espeak will change to klatt 2 automatically.

Someone once commented "espeak voice sounds like a 1960's science fiction robot" and I think its true. Right now we should work to make them better, Interested Anyone?

ALSA Jack Sense problem in Jaunty

Update: Ubuntu Lucid user should read the this updated post Headphone jack sense problem in Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx instead.
The newly ordered batch of Dell Vostro 1014 Laptops have a ALSA sound problem. When you plugin the headphone, sound plays both on headphone and internal speakers as well.
The solution seems either to upgrade ALSA which time consuming and painful. Or pass the correct model name by adding options snd-hda-intel model=dell-bios to /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base.conf.
For now I settled for simple workaround (that is easy for blind users). Created two shortcut keys to enable and disable headphones with gnome keyboard shortcuts.

Name: Enable Headphones
Command: amixer sset Master frontleft mute

Name: Disable Headphones
Command: amixer sset Master frontleft unmute

The downside of this workaround is that you hear only single channel sound on headphones. If you managed to fix this problem on Ubuntu Jaunty, leave a comment.

Ripping Audio With Mplayer

The first step for creating audio description for movies is to extract the audio content. We can do this quickly using little bit of mplayer command line kung fu.

mplayer -novideo -quiet -vc null -vo null -ao pcm videofile [ OR ] mplayer -novideo -quiet -vc null -vo null -ao pcm:file=audio.wav videofile

You can easily join the extracted audio with the audio description track using the Mencoder (MPlayer's Movie Encoder). Right now I haven't completed audio description for a feature length movie yet. My Gnome accessibility works takes a large chunk of my time. If you are interesting in working something like that, get in touch with me.

Gnome Keyboard Shortcuts

Accelerate your Gnome keyboard navigation with these shortcuts. You should master these if you are orca screen reader user along with Orca keyboard shortcuts.

• Global Keyboard Shortcuts
• Alt+F1 Open the Main Applications Menu
• Alt+F2 Open the Run Application dialog.
• Print Screen Take a screenshot of the entire screen.
• Alt+ Print Screen Take a screenshot of the window that currently has focus.
• F1 If the focused element is an application window or dialog, this keyboard shortcut opens the Help for the application.
• Ctrl+F1 If the focused element is a panel or application window, this keyboard shortcut switches the display of tooltips for the window or panel objects on and off.
• Shift+F10 Open a popup menu for the element that has focus (if a popup menu exists for that element).
• Tab Give focus to the next element or control.
• Shift+Tab Reverse the navigation direction and give focus to the previous element or control.
• Ctrl+Tab Give focus to the next element or control if the Tab key has a specific purpose in a control.
• arrow keys Navigate within an element or control.
• spacebar Activate the element or control that has focus.For example, if the current control is a button, this action is the equivalent of clicking on the button with a mouse.
• Esc Close a window, menu, or drawer.
• F7 Switch to caret navigation mode. Caret navigation mode enables you to use the keyboard to select text.
• Ctrl+Alt +D Temporarily hide all windows and give focus to the desktop background.
• Ctrl+Alt +Tab Display a popup window with icons that represent the desktop background and the panels. Press and hold Ctrl+Alt and continue to press Tab to switch the focus between the desktop background and the panels.
• Navigating Windows
• Alt+Tab Display a popup window with icons that represent each window.
• Alt+Esc Raise each window in turn until you reach the window you want.
• Alt+F6 Cycle between windows belonging to the current application (eg, a multiple document interface application like Text Editor).
• Alt+ spacebar Open the Window menu.
• Alt+F4 Close the window.
• Alt+F9 Minimize the window.
• Alt+F10 Maximize the window.
• Alt+F5 Restore a maximized window to its original size.
• Alt+F7 Start the move operation.
• arrow keys Move the window 10 pixels at a time in the direction of the arrow key.
• Ctrl + arrow keys Move the window one pixel at a time in the direction of the arrow key.
• Shift + arrow keys Move the window in the direction of the arrow key and align it with the edge of the nearest window, panel or screen edge.
• spacebar Complete the move operation, leaving the window in the current position.
• Esc Cancel the move operation, restoring the window to its original position.
• Alt+F8 Start the resize operation.
• arrow keys Resize the window in the direction of the arrow key.
• spacebar Complete the resize operation, leaving the window at the current size.
• Esc Cancel the resize operation, restoring the window to its original size.
• F6 Give focus to the next pane.The system gives focus to the control that last had focus in the pane.
• F8 Give focus to the first resize handle in the window.The resize handle is displayed between the panes and enables you to resize the panes.Press F8 again to give focus to the next resize handle.
• Navigating Applications
• F10 Open the first menu on the application menubar.
• Alt + access key Open the menu that is associated with the access key
access keys Select the menu item that is associated with the access key.
• left arrow and right arrow Switch focus between the menus on the menubar.
• up arrow and down arrow Move focus into a menu.
• Esc Close the open menu and give focus to the control that had focus before the menubar.
• Ctrl+O Open the file selector dialog.
• Ctrl+S Open the Save dialog.
• Ctrl+L Open a Location dialog, enabling you to type the name of a file that you want to open or save.
• Ctrl+P Open a Print dialog, if available.
• Ctrl+C Copy highlighted text to the global, application-spanning clipboard.
• Ctrl+X Cut highlighted text to the global, application-spanning clipboard.
• Ctrl+V Paste text from the global, application-spanning clipboard to the current cursor position.
• Alt+access key Activate or select a control.
• Tab Give focus to the next control.
• Ctrl+Page Up Move to the next page/tabbed section of the dialog.
• Ctrl+Page Down Move to the previous page/tabbed section of the dialog.
• Esc Cancel/dismiss the dialog.
• Return Perform the default action for the dialog.
• Navigating Folders
• arrow keys Select the next or previous file or folder in the direction of the arrow key.
• Ctrl + arrow keys Give focus to the next or previous file or folder but do not select the item.
spacebar Open the focused file or folder.
• Ctrl + spacebar Select the item that currently has focus.
• Home Select the first file or folder within the current folder.
• End Select the last file or folder within the current folder.
• backspace Open the current folder's parent folder.
• Shift-F10 Open a file or folder popup menu.
• Ctrl-F10 Open the enclosing folder's popup menu (equivalent to right-clicking on the view pane background).
• F6 Switch focus between the side pane and the view pane.
• Shift+F10 Open the side pane popup menu.
• Caret Navigation Mode
• F7 Switch to caret navigation mode [Yelp-only].
• left arrow Move one character to the left.
• right arrow Move one character to the right.
• up arrow Move up one line.
• down arrow Move down one line.
• Ctrl + left arrow Move to the beginning of the previous word.
• Ctrl + right arrow Move to the end of the next word.
• Page Up Scroll up one page of content.
• Page Down Scroll down one page of content.
• Home Move to the beginning of the current line.
• End Move to the end of the current line.
• Shift + arrow keys Move from the current position to the destination position, selecting all text between the two positions.
• Tab Move focus to the next focusable control.
• Shift+Tab Move focus to the previous focusable control.
• Enter Activate a button, link or other control
.