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Here's an idea: someone should produce a series of ebooks that teach how to use GNOME and popular applications (e.g. Firefox and LibreOffice) with Orca, in a systematic way with activities for each concept or task, then use the proceeds from sales of those ebooks to help fund development of Orca and the free desktop accessibility stack in general, as NV Access has done with NVDA and their training ebooks. I think there would be a market for that.

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Matt Campbell

I've been working through the NVDA basic training ebook, which covers the basics of using Windows with NVDA, with a blind high-school student. I've been repeatedly frustrated with how the book has to cover the variations between versions of Windows, and how Windows still nonetheless surprises us both by deviating from the book in some way. His Notepad had Copilot enabled, and I had to figure out how to go into Settings and turn that off.
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Matt Campbell

Of course, GNOME and (especially?) Firefox are subject to UI churn as well, and Mozilla is now adding AI where people don't necessarily want it. But maybe it's not as bad (yet?) as what Microsoft has been doing with Windows 11.

One possible mitigation might be if the training material was aligned with a recent LTS distro. Maybe the recently released Debian 13 (trixie)?

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Matt Campbell

Incidentally, on the topic of LTS distros where Orca works well on Wayland, particularly with GNOME, I regret that the implementation of proper keystroke monitoring and grabbing, which I prototyped in mid 2024 and which someone else brought to production in time for GNOME 48, didn't get there in time for RHEL 10, which ships GNOME 47. Maybe I could have done more to bring that important functionality to production sooner, but my efforts were focused elsewhere in the second half of 2024.
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TheEvilSkeleton 🇼🇳 đŸłïžâ€âš§ïž

please don't blame yourself over something Red Hat did not pay you to do (presumably). Looking at the GNOME Release Calendar, 47 is no longer supported; by using 47, they're essentially in unsupported territory, so beyond that this is 100% on them.

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This entry was edited (11 hours ago)
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Matt Campbell

Correction: RHEL 10 backported the keyboard monitor implementation in Mutter, and updated at-spi2-core and Orca to versions with that feature. Thanks to @AdrianVovk for pointing out that this was likely.

Still, I think it might be better to align with Debian 13 (trixie), which ships GNOME 48, for my training idea, both because it has a slightly newer version of GNOME (and presumably other components too), and because the upstream distro is fully free.

@Adrian Vovk
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Rene Ludwig

@AdrianVovk So what distro would you recommend for somebody like me who is quite an experienced user but not a developer? My last linux experiments I had with a Raspi5 where i tried to build my own mini computer with a qwerty keyboard inspired by the BTSpeak. But unfortunately Orca didn‘t work well on raspberry PI OS and i didn‘t manage to fix this by using another desktop.
@Adrian Vovk
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miki

and I'd say:

1. Pair this with a blind-friendly distro that has everything configured (you'd need NFB/ACB support for this, as you probably need the metaphorical "company letterhead" to get secure boot certified).

2. Autotranslate into all the languages via LLMs. Sure, human translations are better than automatic translations, but automatic translations are better than nothing. Source: Not a native English speaker, I've actually relied on them back when Google Translate was borderline unusable.

3. Preferrably, pair this with scripts that can "walk through" the scenarios described in the book, making sure Orca output stays consistent as versions change. You could also this to automatically record multilingual walkthroughs, with human-written commentary between the steps.

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miki

NVAccess basically ignores 80+% of the addressable market with their basic training materials. While NVDA itself is translatable (and actively translated), everything else, including their website, is pretty much as hostile to international visitors as you can get. This is pretty hypocritical, as the English-speaking countries are the ones where you're most likely to get either JAWS, government-sponsored AT training, or both.
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Matt Campbell

I doubt we'd need a fully custom distro, with its own boot loader and unified kernel image that would need to be specially signed for Secure Boot. A stock boot loader and UKI from one of the major distros should be enough. For the rest of the distro, a Debian Pure Blend (debian.org/blends/) might be enough.

I really like the idea of using the training activities as regression tests.

Debian Pure Blends

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