[BRLTTY] WORDS AND WORDS... BUT GNOPERNICUS?

[Kenny Hitt]

Hi.

I am a Debian user who has been trying Gnome accessibility for the past
2 years.  Recently, I have become discouraged with the whole project.
However, I don't like quitting, so I'll keep trying.  Just be aware that
I'm not very positive toward the project or it's developers lately.

Building the latest Gnopernicus from source might help, but don't get
upset if you can't get Gnopernicus working.  I have 2 Debians systems
here.  One has a working Gnopernicus with Braille support.  It's speech
support only now works with a commercial synth.  The commercial synth
isn't stable, so I` will get crashes within a short period of starting
Gnopernicus.  I had stable speech output with Festival until I made the
mistake of upgrading the gnome-speech package.  The upgrade broke
festival support.  Down grading to my previously working version of
gnome-speech didn't get festival support back.  My short term solution
is to just disable speech support and use Braille.  Unfortunately, not
all messages are sent to the braille display, so you will have problems
with this solution if you don't already have some idea what is
happening.  I've used Gnome log enough so I can usually guess what has
happened when the system stops responding.

Although I've tried to duplicate the results on my second Debian system,
I haven't managed to get Braille support working.  I haven't been able
to understand what is missing on the second system, but I must be
missing something.  Once again, the only speech support I can get is
using a commercial synth that isn't stable.  Since I can't get Braille
support working on this system, I don't use Gnome on it.

I'm sure the problems I have with Gnopernicus are my own user error, so
you should try for yourself.  I'll be happy to try to help you get
Gnopernicus running.  Since we both use Debian, maybe two people looking
at the problem can find a final solution.  I've been playing with Gnome
for 2 years, so I think I remember nost of the tricks needed to get it
working.  A lot of things in Gnome accessibility have changed since the
documentation was writtten.  If you read through the mailing list
archives, you can find them, but you will need to pick the latest
approach since earlier methods no longer work.  I had started writing a
doc with Debian specific solutions, but I lost it after a rm command and
just haven't tried to create it again.

For now, both my Braille displays need
repair, so I've returned to running in the text console with speakup for
my screen reader.  I would like to understand why I can't get consistant
results with Gnopernicus, but until I have a working braille display, I
can't see any reason to use Gnome.

my main interest in Gnome was Mozilla
access.  I never had much success with Mozilla access either, so I'm
becoming more interested in solving web accessibility problems with a
text browser.

I don't have the problem of not having access to the browser in the text
console.  The problem there is that no one browser supports all the
features used on some web sites.  Since this is a problem that effects
all users of the browser, and the developers of at least one of these
browsers want to create a text browser with all features, I believe the
problem will be solved faster than the problems with Mozilla
accessibility.

Hope this helps.
          Kenny
	  
On Tue, Aug 09, 2005 at 09:53:53PM +0100, mrkiko wrote:
> 
> 
> 
> I'm a debian user and I already seen various sites speaking about problems that 
> gnopernicus may have in this distro. It's because the debian packagers are 
> using version 0.9.19-2, and, while the project is agai nin beta stage, probably 
> this version has many bugs... I tried, after following all the documentation 
> tricks and tips to run gnopernicus. I got many brlapi errors. I report they 
> there.
> 
> srcore: (brlapi_waitForAck) Received unknown packet of type 101 and size 4
> srcore: (brlapi_waitForAck) Received unknown packet of type 101 and size 4
> 
> After these errors, I stopped trying.
> 
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