Re: [Tails-dev] State of TAILS accessibility with Orca; Tor…

Delete this message

Reply to this message
Author: Hadi Rezaee
Date:  
To: intrigeri, The Tails public development discussion list
Subject: Re: [Tails-dev] State of TAILS accessibility with Orca; Tor totally works within Iran using Pluggable transports (ScrambleSuit)
Hi intrigeri
Thanks for your reply!

Regarding Orca issues.
There's a slight problem with Orca getting stuck on firefox while
navigating with the keyboard to read the sites. you need to alt+tab out
of firefox, and get in, to fix it. It's not a very chritical issue, but
it's a very annoying one.
Also, general navigation is broken a bit, so you cannot interact with
forms with old Orca and newer firefox, Orca loses the focus and drops
you at the first of the page.
In Thunderbird, Orca's focus jumps around and when i read the subjects,
Orca randomly mutes the speech in the middle of speaking.

Regarding features, There's some new focus mode features for browsing,
that makes it easier to interact with forms and buttons. There's also a
new feature that turns off the virtual layout view off, allowing users
to brows sites line by line with Orca.

I just saw your link regarding Debian Jessie. I think there are many
good improvements on next Debian Jessie, and the accessibility team is
putting a very great amount of energy on that.
How's the state of tails unstable with Debian Jessie. Can i test it out?
Is there a way for me to launch Orca at the greeter window, if the
testing version has one?

I think, regarding accessibility, it would be great to focus on next
generation Tails which is on Debian jessie, instead of the old one which
runs on debian stable.
I will happily test the unstable version, and feedback on it, provided
that it has Orca installed and i can turn it on at the greeter window
with some sort of hotkey.

Cheers
Hadi


On 10/15/2014 8:57 PM, intrigeri wrote:
> Hi,
>
> [no need to Cc me, I read the list.]
>
> First, thanks a lot for your feedback!
>
> Hadi Rezaee wrote (14 Oct 2014 14:09:34 GMT) :
>> I've tested tails 1.2 RC1, And there's a big problem with Orca in general.
>> The version of Orca that tails is running seems to be extremely old. It's the
>> version that was released alongside of Gnome 3.4 which i think is about 2-3
>> years ago.
> Tails is based on Debian stable, which indeed ships a relatively old
> GNOME on today's standards. There are vague ideas to use Debian
> testing as a basis some day, but we're far from be there yet. The good
> news is that our current focus (milestone 2.0) is about streamlining
> our development and release process, and getting ourselves a more
> autonomous APT repository, and both together pave the way towards
> being able to do that... some day.
>
> Anyhow, let's focus more on actual problems, than on version numbers,
> if you don't mind:
>
>> This version has serious issues with newer Firefox browser,
>> Thunderbird and Pidgin.
> Could you please elaborate a bit about these issues?
>
> (During the life cycle of a Debian stable release, there is *some*
> room for fixing such bugs.)
>
>> It lacks many new features as well.
> Could you please be a little bit more specific regarding what features
> are missing, and what are the practical consequences in terms of
> user experience?
>
>> Is it possible to compile and include the latest version of Orca from Orca Master git
>> to Tails?
> If only...
>
> I've just given it a try, and it's not easy: it depends on at-spi2
> 2.10+, which is not available in Debian Wheezy, and I'm not sure that
> other tools we ship that use at-spi2 would work with the newer version
> without substantial backporting work.
>
> So, our best bet seems to be: speed up the porting of Tails to Debian
> Jessie -- help is welcome:
> https://mailman.boum.org/pipermail/tails-testers/2014-October/000074.html
>
>> Regarding The current state of Iran vs Tor.
>> Last year i stopped using tails and Tor because Tor was very unstable on Iran's
>> connections and it used to not work at all.
>> Last weak i gave Tor a try with the new Pluggable Transport called "ScrambleSuit",
>> and It instantly connected to the Tor network, and i wasn't getting any disconnects
>> and dropouts for 10 hours straight!
>> This is a very huge advancement in Tor, just wanted to mention it.
> Great, thanks for reporting back!
>
> Tails doesn't support scramblesuit yet (WIP:
> https://labs.riseup.net/code/issues/7909), but it does support obfs3,
> which may work in Iran.
>
> Cheers,