[oats-sig] on Orca and SOK

On 7/23/2006, "Henrik Nilsen Omma" <henrik at ubuntu.com> wrote:

Steve Lee wrote:
> On 7/23/2006, "Henrik Nilsen Omma" <henrik at ubuntu.com> wrote:
>
>   
>> You should also note that we will be replacing the gnopernicus screen
>> reader with Orca (see: http://live.gnome.org/Orca) and GOK will be
>> replaced with SOK.
>>     
>
> That sounds like a good move as gnopernicus appears to be less than
> ready. I've not seen SOK, do you have a URL?
>
> Are there any details of the reasons for those changes for interest?
>   
Orca is really the next generation in screen reading for Linux, 
developed by a team at Sun Microsystems. It's written in Python, which 
is easier to maintain than C code and it allows for custom scripts to 
improve interaction with applications. This is esp. useful in apps with 
non-standard interfaces like an instant messaging client. Orca will 
likely become the default in Gnome 2.16 (released in September) and 
gnopernicus will gradually be phased out. The gnopernicus team support 
this move to a new generation and are now contributing to Orca. See: 
http://mail.gnome.org/archives/desktop-devel-list/2006-June/msg00009.html

I did a review of GOK half a year ago where I found it to have very poor 
usability. It's codebase is also mature and seemingly rigid (written in 
C). I decided to launch a new On-screen keyboard called the Simple 
'On-screen Keyboard' (SOK) to start from scratch and use some modern 
technologies like Python and Cairo, and _keep it simple_.

You can see a summary of it here: 
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Accessibility/Projects/SOK

and get a copy here:
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Accessibility/Projects/SOK/dev

The actual development is done by a Google Summer of Code student.

- Henrik