GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 521684
Any information that is presented in speech should also be readily available in braille
Last modified: 2010-09-20 10:54:34 UTC
From Tom on the Orca list: ----------- One of my problems is that I normally use braille with no speech. I find that there are things I miss this way and some things that don't work as well. For example the notification info never shows up on my braille display. Some of my computers don't have working speech and at work I normally have it off as I don't like headphones and I don't like disturbing others. ----------- This support is also needed for folks who are Deaf-Blind. Mike was planning on looking at verbosity options. Perhaps as part of that consideration, we should look at another level of braille verbosity for users who only use braille or who primarily use braille for their access.
An alternative to adding further verbosity options would be to extend the navigational model for braille by providing commands to display notifications, the type of the current object and other details that are typically spoken but not brailled. A third option, combining features of the first two, would be to enable the verbosity level to be changed as originally suggested, but to assign the verbosity changing commands to BRLTTY events, i.e., commands issued from the braille display. This would make it easy to change the types of information presented quickly within an interactive session, without having to waste time modifying Orca preferences to accomplish each change. Of course, any additional verbosity options should also be available from the preferences interface. If additional verbosity settings are provided, changing the settings via the braille display should immediately re-display the currently focused object in the way specified by the new configuration.
Note that additional information about objects conveyed via speech is sometimes not presented in braille. For example in Firefox, when a selection list is presented, the number of items in the list is spoekn, but not brailled. In part, this could be solved by providing better verbosity settings; in addition, the "where am I" function could display this information in braille.
I'm changing several details of this bug: * Might as well start with the "bug" (as opposed to "enhancement"). As has been observed by Jason, there are details Orca presents in speech but not in braille. For someone who is Deaf-Blind that means that there are some details which are inaccessible as a result of Orca's failure to provide them via an accessible medium/output. * The new summary is both to describe the scope of this bug and the stance that I think we, as a community, need to take. Speech-only features are not cool. * The target I've set (2.31.4) is largely due to feature, gui, and string freezes, but we've got a bunch of other stuff that needs doing as well. * I'm assigning this to myself. If I'm going to keep beating the Deaf-Blind drum, I cannot very well turn around and say "and somebody else better fix it!" <smiles> Anyhoo.... This might turn out to be pretty trivial to fix. As Jason pointed out, some of this could be handled via whereAmI. Also, we now have braille "flash" messages so that we can quickly display something and then return to what was being displayed before.
Since the bugs this bug was depending on have been fixed, I'm going to close this bug out. As we find additional instances where we are not presenting something in braille that we should be, a new bug for that particular issue should be opened.