Blind web-browsing on Ubuntu

4 August 2008, 15:57

As part of an assignment for my usability class, I had to test web accessibility.

First, I wanted to try what was bundled in Ubuntu, since you hear that it’s an accessible operating system.

So I tried Orca, it sounds awful (clearly a distro integration problem) and after a little messing around, I finally found out that I would need to work to get this going because it needs firefox 3 (I’m still using 2 since I haven’t upgraded my ubuntu to 8.04 yet).

Then I tried Firefox Accessibility Extension developed by Illinois Center for Information Technology Accessibility (ICITA). It is nice and it does output useful information but it seems that it is intended for developers. I couldn’t find any component that would do screen reading.

Next, I decided to try Firevox. When installing on linux you get to choose between Orca or Java’s FreeTTS as the voice engine. I went with Orca since it was already installed. That didn’t work either. No sound. I wanted to do it using FreeTTS but since it was not packaged in Ubuntu in a clean way (having to mess with Java’s classpath), I abandonned.

Next, I wanted to try the Sound Enhanced Lynx but seeing that the installation seemed complex, I decided to search for a package in Synaptic. I found LSR. I installed it and try to run it from the menu. Nothing.

From command line:

olivier@boreale:~$ lsr
Linux Screen Reader ver. 0.5.3 rev. Mon Jun  4 17:21:12 UTC 2007
Copyright (c) 2005, 2007 IBM Corporation
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/bin/lsr", line 29, in <module>
    AEMain.main()
  File "/usr/lib/python2.5/site-packages/lsr/AEMain.py", line 624, in main
    mtd(options)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.5/site-packages/lsr/AEMain.py", line 385, in run
    raise ValueError(_('Profile %s does not exist') % options.profile)
ValueError: Profile None does not exist@

Ok, well I’ll try creating a profile.

olivier@boreale:~$ lsr -c user
Linux Screen Reader ver. 0.5.3 rev. Mon Jun  4 17:21:12 UTC 2007
Copyright (c) 2005, 2007 IBM Corporation
Created profile user

Next, try to get some speech to output:

olivier@boreale:~$ lsr -y "this is a test"
Linux Screen Reader ver. 0.5.3 rev. Mon Jun  4 17:21:12 UTC 2007
Copyright (c) 2005, 2007 IBM Corporation
No handlers could be found for logger "Device"
Said: this is a test

Aah, no sound output, digging around I find that I need to install gnome-speech. So I popped up Synaptic and searched for gnome-speech and found a few different implementation. I decided to install gnome-speech-ibmtts which pulled a couple of dependencies. Tried again without any output..

Going back to Sound Enhanced Lynx (SeLynx). I tried to download the tarball: 404 Missing Document. Argh!

After all of this, for my assignment, I ended up fetching html documents using wget and then sending the raw html to espeak using the right parameters. Even that didn’t went that well:

olivier@boreale:~$ espeak -m -f index.html 
Erreur de segmentation (core dumped)

But I was able to get some relevant sound before the segfault.

So, before doing this little test I thought Linux was pretty accessible for visually impaired people. My conclusion: It is not! After all this messing around I was not able to get screen reading for a web browser working. That’s sad.

— Olivier Bilodeau

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Comment

  1. Clearly there are a lot of issues with the version of Linux you used.

    However, I don’t think you should generalise to ‘Linux is not accessible’ when you have tested only an old version of Ubuntu – your statements may well be true of Gutsy or earlier versions (you don’t say which version you used), but for all I know these issues are fixed in Ubuntu 8.04 and others. And you do say that the Orca problems are ‘clearly a distro integration problem’.

    Statements like ‘sounds awful’ aren’t very descriptive either – is it a machine like voice, sound card problems, or what?

    Maybe you could try using a Live CD of Ubuntu 8.04 and see if that improves matters.

    — Richard · 10 October 2008, 09:00 · #

  2. You pretty much explained what i too went through; its still quit a mission making a web browser accessible to the visually impaired

    — lawrence · 1 July 2009, 04:14 · #

  3. LSR doesn’t run in 9.04 either unfortunately. Error on an import of AEMain. Digging around for answers at the moment. I am sure it can be fixed (it looks as though the bug has already been filed), though it’s a little disappointing it doesn’t ‘just work’ ;)

    — cmemery · 12 July 2009, 16:28 · #

  4. Mismo resultado con ubuntu 9.04: no funciona.

    — Victor De la Rocha · 11 October 2009, 11:39 · #

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