Posts Tagged ‘Linux’

Jim Zemlin on this year’s breakout of the Linux desktop

Wednesday, August 27th, 2008

Jim Zemlin of the Linux foundation wrote a very good post on this year being the year of the Linux desktop breakthrough. One thing he did only mention marginally, but which I think is just as important for certain users/markets, is the fact that there is now a wide range of accessibility solutions available for at least the GNOME desktop, which either come directly with the distribution such as the Orca screen reader for the visually impaired, or are easily installable. Screen reading, which includes support for a huge variety of braille displays, magnification, on-screen keyboard solutions, alternative input device support are all available as open-source now and open up the Linux desktop alternative to virtually every potential user.

And there’s more when it comes to the mobile platform. The Mozilla Foundation funded a feasibility study last year to migrate the communication layer for the assistive technology service provider interface (AT-SPI) from using Corba to using DBus, which is a key part in getting screen reading support on the mobile Linux platform. Nokia is now funding the actual migration work. I’ll blog more about the mobile prospective from an accessibility standpoint in the near future.

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Posted in Accessibility, Orca | 5 Comments »

Firefox integration into Linux also sounds native to the platform

Thursday, January 10th, 2008

Michael Ventnor, a Mozilla intern working on the Linux integration of Firefox 3, just posted a great summary of the work that has been done for Firefox 3. For those of you who can see, he also has a bunch of screen shots that show Firefox nicely integrating into the Gnome Desktop on Ubuntu.

I’d like to add a few items that a blind user who uses Firefox 3 with Orca will notice.

Aside from the obvious, the web browsing itself, great attention has been paid to make dialogs such as the Preferences dialog behave like dialogs in other Gnome apps: The Cancel button comes before the OK button while tabbing through the dialog. The dialog itself is found under the Edit menu, as is usual for other Gnome apps, and it’s called “Preferences”, not “Options” like on Windows.

The Location Bar is an AutoComplete, a widget type not found on Windows, but used natively on Linux.

The Places Organizer tree tables are native tree tables, displaying hierarchical information in multi-column view.

As you would expect, the Open File, or any kind of Save As dialogs are the native Gnome dialogs, so if you’re used to using GEdit, OpenOffice etc., you’ll feel right at home, Firefox is not requiring you to learn something new here.

One inconsistency I found–and I’ll have to find out whether a fix for this is planned– is the fact that above mentioned Tree Tables cannot be navigated like, for example, in Nautilus: In Nautilus, you expand a collapsed item using the + key, and collapse it using the - key. Pressing Right Arrow moves you one column to the right, Left Arrow moves you one column to the left. This does not yet work in Firefox (or Thunderbird, for that matter). There, Right Arrow expands, Left Arrow collapses an expandable node, and moving between columns isn’t possible at all currently. So this is typical Windows-style still, but within that, consistent across platforms.

All in all, I expect the browsing experience with Firefox 3 on Linux to be a great one. The Orca team is putting hard work into making Orca work well with Firefox, and the past month alone has brought an emense boost in speed, as discussed here.

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Posted in Accessibility, Firefox, Mozilla, Orca | No Comments »