Darragh Ó Héiligh blog and accessibility guides

Remember a while ago while testing Ubuntu 8.04; I spoke about the problems that it had introduced for users of the Gnome assistive technologies? Well, I was really relieved to see that the released version seems to install without any problems and Orca, the screen reader for Gnome worked great. Without this screen reader, I would have had to depend on sighted assistance during every installation of the product. That is something that I find completely unacceptable so you can imagine my excitement when it came up talking as it should.

Before explaining the problem that now exists with Ubuntu 8.0, I should explain a bit about how Linux" systems control access to system administration components.

When you break it down to its simplest form, Linux" has two levels of permissions.  Standard user and root.  Standard users are the normal every day accounts used by everyone.  Root is the account used by administrators.  Processes launched by a user can be manipulated by the root user however processes launched by root are accessible to other administrators but in general; they are not accessible by processes running at the user level.  Therefore, if you run an administrative application for doing something like adding or removing software sources and you have Orca running as normal, Orca will not be able to read the Installation sources application.  For some reason though, when Orca is run as root, it will not access applications run at a user level.  That’s something that can be explained but it takes a bit more thought so I’ll leave it for now.

The problem is that Orca is not reading these administrative windows. I should be able to unload Orca, change to the root user then relaunch the screen reader again before starting the administrative tool however that doesn’t work.  The tool launches without any issue however Orca does not read it. 

This is a particularly critical flaw in my opinion and it is one that has really turned me off using this version of the distribution.  I think I’ll stick with 7.11 for the moment.