** Sebastian, one of the blind participants of the Accessibility-Meets-Usability weekend, just told me that the development of Gnopernicus, a screen reader and magnifier for Gnome, has been stopped. I hope these are just rumours? It would be a pity. Instead, the development of Orca will be reinforced which is actually good news (thanks henrik for the clarification!).
** Aaron pointed me to this article about usability in Linux projects on tomshardware.com. It's great to read our work is getting such positive attention =)
** Together with Bjoern from OpenUsability I'll attend the tOSSad Workshop in Como on Saturday, a workshop on Governmental, Educational, Usability, and Legal Issues towards Open Source Software Adoption in an enlarged Europe. I'm looking forward to meet Gorkem there who is very active translating KDE and works on the Turkish Linux distribution Pardus.
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Gnopernicus
Ellen,
The gradual winding down of Gnopernicus development is actually a good-news story (!?) A much more flexible alternative called Orca has been under development for some time, and people have been suggesting that it should be included with Gnome 2.16 as the default screen reader (something we in the Ubuntu access team support). The main advantage of Orca is that it is scriptable so that it can adapt to the host applications like the wordprocessor or browser and thereby provide better functionality. It is also written to be less tied to the DE, so it should be easier to get it working in KDE (once we get AT-SPI support). It has a strong team behind it and is progressing nicely. See: http://live.gnome.org/Orca/
The Gnopernicus team has made the very admirable decision to support the Orca project in the long term, because they see its obvious merits. This is a mature move IMO, putting the needs of the users first and avoiding fragmentation. See: http://mail.gnome.org/archives/orca-list/2006-June/msg00004.html
I think the Gnopernicus team deserves a great deal of public praise for this move
As for the magnifier part, Orca already supports gnome-mag, but we are currently working on the next generation of compiz-based magnification. The Ubuntu team is involved (with myself and a summer of Code student) as is IBM. See: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Accessibility/Specs/compiz-mag
orca
Hi henrik,
thanks for the clarification, I understand it's indeed good news =)
Sebastian and Henning offered to participate in future Gnopernicus usability tests - we would be happy to support Orca if now if there is a need.
Cheers,
/el
Bah!
Too bad Görkem told me too late so I couldn't attend there with him, it would be fun to be there, so have fun and feel free to kick Görkem for me