[Access-activists] Re: Somewhat Embarrassing

[Chong Yidong]

Richard Stallman <address@hidden> writes:

>     GNU Emacs is probably the most well known program from the Free
>     Software Foundation. For a blind user, it works pretty well with
>     Speakup in a text console but the one that runs off of the GNOME
>     desktop is entirely inaccessible... orca cannot see or speak data
>     in this window.
>
> What about Emacsspeak?  Can you make it work that way?
>
>     If we handout CDs at NFB, someone might notice that our flagship
>     program is only accessible in a text console and they may choose
>     to "condemn and deplore" us for a silly reason.
>
>     So, what do we do?
>
> Let's see if we can make this work soon.
>
> I have cc'd the Emacs maintainers, but since this is sensitive,
> I did not send this message to the public Emacs mailing list.

I am not aware of the context of this discussion.  If I understand the
original poster's intent, it is to use Orca, instead of T.V. Raman's
Emacspeak system, to interact with Emacs.  Correct?

It would be an extremely difficult job to get Emacs to switch to GTK
rendering.  However, from my understanding Orca uses an API, called
AT-SPI, so Emacs or Emacspeak might be able to "talk to" it directly via
this interface.  However, the documentation for AT-SPI documentation
seems to be poor to non-existent.

Maybe T.V. Raman can give us his advice.