I want to use XFCE

[Brian J. Tarricone]

Hi Jon,

josh wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> You said that I may have to install some gnome libraries? Would you be able 
> to find which libraries need to be included and include them for the next 
> major (or minor) release of XFCE?

No, I meant that I believe that Orca may have some library dependencies 
outside of what Xfce itself requires.  You'd be installing them as a 
part of installing Orca, not as a part of installing Xfce.  (I imagine 
you already have Orca installed, so there's probably nothing to do here 
on your pare.)

> My ultimate plan hopefuly is to try and 
> help out blind people in my state, and XFCE running with at-spi and Orca 
> would be nice...

This may just be a misconception on my part, but I'm pretty sure that 
there's very little Xfce has to do to make the at-spi bits work 
properly.  Gtk (the toolkit that both GNOME and Xfce use to draw its 
user interfaces) supports at-spi already.  There may be some custom 
widgets that we've created for Xfce that aren't completely accessible, 
but this is a matter of adding accessibility-related code to those 
widgets to fix them.  I'm not very knowledgeable about that, so it would 
really be up to someone who is to identify areas that need improvement 
and file bugs in our bug tracker.

> also maybe for the next release of 
> xubuntu which uses the XFCE desktop you could include those gnome libraries 
> so that way XFCE could finally be accessible for blind people.

That's up to the Xubuntu guys; we just provide the core desktop, and 
it's up to the distributions to customise and set it up for their needs.

> Also is there any equivalent to direct-x in linux XFCE?

Mostly: there's SDL (the Simple Directmedia Layer) which provides much 
of the functionality that DirectX does on Windows.

> I unfortunately am not a programmer yet, and not sure if I have what it 
> takes to ever become one. I'll explain how an audio game works. With most 
> audio games there is just a plain dialog box, because not sure about linux 
> but in windows you need some indicator the program is running. Ok so the 
> game has no graphics or pictures whatsoever in it. Let's take Dark Destroyer 
> for example, a free space invaders game for blind people. no...better yet, 
> enemy attack since it's free and open source. Ok so no pictures whatsoever 
> on screen. Now when the main menu loads up when you up and down arrow you 
> hear, start new game, check speakers. this is because when you arrow down to 
> check speakers most audio games are in stereo. so this plays a sound that 
> moves from the far left channel to the far right channel so you can tell if 
> you speakers or headphones are set up in the right positions. So when you 
> play the game, the game is based on matching where you hear the sounds at in 
> the stereo field or in some cases, even the surround sound field. But most 
> people don't have surround sound so all the games have stereo options also. 
> So lets say there's an enemy plain sound in the right speaker I hit or hold 
> in left and right arrows, moving the sound back and forth until it's 
> centered. Then I hit the spacebar to fire whatever weapon i choose. then if 
> I have the enemy sound centered the enemy is killed. in edition the sound 
> lowers in pitch and starts out quiet and gets louder gradually as the enemy 
> character gets closer. Shades of doom by gma games www.gmagames.com is 
> another example of an audio game. If I could run most of my favorite 
> programs in Linux I'd certainly switch to it. ESpeak for orca supports lots 
> of languages so that's not a problem but I would really miss not being able 
> to play jim's nfl football and other games like that.

Cool, I had no idea how that sort of thing works.  I don't know if there 
are many people working on that sort of thing for Linux, but 
unfortunately here isn't the best place to look for it.  We're a 
relatively small group of people -- we hardly have enough time to 
maintain the core desktop apps, let alone work on other things!

	-brian