[Kde-accessibility] Information about orca

Peter Korn Peter.Korn at Sun.COM
Thu Jun 1 23:33:24 CEST 2006


Hi Sauro,
> I'd like to know if I can use orca in both kde and gnome?
> Can i use every kind of software based on x with it?
> How can I install that screen reader?
> thank in advance for all information.
Briefly: not quite yet today, no, and see the Orca web site.

Screen readers for graphical UNIX systems like KDE and GNOME work by 
interrogating the applications and user interface elements directly - 
rather than by replacing the video driver or inserting themselves in the 
X protocol and building an Off-Screen Model of the text and semantic 
objects on the screen.  As such, they only work with applications that 
expose their information via standard API calls.  The standard we 
developed as part of the GNOME Accessibility Project is the Assistive 
Technology Service Provider Interface (or AT-SPI).  This is implemented 
by the GNOME desktop, the GTK+ graphics library, the Java/Swing library, 
the UNO library of StarOffice, and the XUL library of Firefox/Mozilla.  
Applications written with these graphical libraries, or which otherwise 
implement AT-SPI (like Adobe Reader 7 for Linux and Solaris), should 
work with Orca.  Orca is still in fairly early development (version 
0.2.4), and works better with some apps and some graphical libraries 
than others.  KDE 4 (and Qt4) plan to support AT-SPI, at which time Orca 
should work with KDE as well.

Information on installing Orca, and on most other things Orca related, 
are on the main Orca website: http://live.gnome.org/Orca  There, in 
addition to general installation instructions, you will find information 
on installing Orca on Fedora Core 5, Ubuntu Dapper Drake, and Sun 
OpenSolaris.

You might also join the Orca mailing list: <orca-list at gnome.org>.  You 
can subscribe via the web interface at: 
http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/orca-list


Regards,

Peter Korn
Accessibility Architect,
Sun Microsystems, Inc.


More information about the kde-accessibility mailing list