Accessibility Tools in Future Releases?

Greetings. I love Zorin OS and have been having no issues switching hardened Windows users to it. Everyone I have done so with has said nothing but good things and I love using it myself. However, I have some concerns to address regarding accessibility tools such as screen magnification for the visually impaired. It seems that these projects have simply fallen by the wayside, are now dated and most I have found are broken / don't work worth a darn within Zorin OS.

I, like most people here, wish for Zorin to be hugely successful, but the exclusion of such valuable tools is enough to keep me from bringing some new users into the fold as they simply cannot function without the assistance. Such software comes bundled out of the box with proprietary OS's like Windows and OS X and even several other Linux distributions. As someone who loves your product, please consider including such valuable software within your distribution, even if a new project has to be started to make new software to do so. I and a great many others would be eternally grateful for the efforts!

Otherwise, keep up the great work with your distro!!!

Hi Hoax, and Welcome!

Zorin does indeed have magnification tools within the Accessibility area of Compiz!

In fact I made a tutorial video (Zorin 6 Ultimate) but it is still there in the current release:

http://vimeo.com/57264420

What is bad (and this is nothing to do with Zorin, but the Gnome3 project) is that Orca (screenreader) is not configurable period - see my post here about this:

viewtopic.php?f=3&t=6362

Enjoy the accessibility functions of Compiz!

Hopefully it stays that way, is the basic gist of this. I'm seeing it vanishing more and more from other distros, which is an alarming step backwards imho. One more reason why Zorin is the best!

HI there. The problem is that Compiz was the brainchild of a technical genius employed by Canonical (Ubuntu) - he left them last year in order to complete his Computer Science Degree and by all accounts has no intention of returning - in the meantime there are 13 members of staff at Canonical working on Compiz - but like a lot of Assistive Products - if the leading light leaves or worst case scenario, meets with an untimely demise it is hard to match that calibre of genius. With regards to the screenreader this is not any distributions fault. Orca (to the best of my knowledge) was made for the Gnome DE - it was created by a technical guy at Sun Microsystems who had sight-loss himself - this was before it was taken over by Oracle and to be honest I don't know what the state of play is with Orca - what I do know is that Gnome Project is trying to mimic Apple and just have a simple 'on/off' approach to whether a voice synthesizer is present or not. Orca in its truest form has a raft of customisations to match any proprietary product, including 'exception' lists, so for example, $1.50 could have an exception made so that it would announce the price correctly - without an exception it would speak $1.50 as 'dollar one point fifty' - with an exception editor it would read 'one dollar fifty' and so on. Things are looking grim from an Assistive Technology point of view. Compiz is not restricted to Zorin - it is present in other distros. People should be lobbying the Gnome Project to get Orca back to a full functioning screen reader and not to pander to Apple 'fanbois' - sorry if I have offended any Apple users but I would be curious to know if 'VoiceOver' has full 'screenreader' tweaks like a commercial version that runs on Windows!

VoiceOver I have very little experience with on the desktop side of things. It is absolutely amazing on iPhones though and a lot of my low vision and fully blind friends and peers swear by it. As far as I have tried it on the desktop, I'd say it is very good (I don't know all the keystrokes and commands for it though so to use it as a normal every day user would is beyond me). That being said, it is probably not nearly as advanced as other proprietary software in the same vein, such as JAWS for Windows.

As for screen magnification, I do prefer software that functions more like Apple's Zoom than Windows's Magnifier. I have used some solutions within Linux in the past that were very similar and made me happy.

I'm not a fanboy of either vein, as there are things I love and hate about all OS's (OS X, Windows, Linux and pretty much everything else.) So far Zorin has been pretty great about combining all the things I love about all of them.