Firstly I remember there is something on the Lucid installer about pressing the keyboard to get to the accessible install, but then what? And when do you press stuff? No cheating and plugging in the monitor, but I am allowed to Google for instructions on my other PC.

Apparently the process is

Press space every 3-4 seconds, several times, then enter, then
F5, then 3, then enter

hmm, ok. That sucks a bit. How about a beep or something at the point when I am supposed to interrupt it? Bonus points for playing a soundfile telling me what to press for an audio install. Anyhow, I seem to have missed the opportunity to press space, it seems to have done some stuff and now stopped. Lets reboot and try again.

Just realised I was looking at the CD activity light, to see what it was doing in the bootup process, that is cheating so I turned it round so I can’t see that (I could hear the heads moving too and feel the vibrations, but clues from lights are not allowed in this experiment.)

OK, booting again, lets hope I hit the magic moment . . .

. . . silence.

Really not sure what is happening here, did I miss it? Have I waited long enough? Is it going to tell me what to do next? Is it sat waiting for me to plug in a monitor. I have no idea.

Can’t feel or hear any activity from the CD any more, left it a few more minutes. Hit return and it started doing stuff. I think I must have missed the accessible install and it was sat at the normal live cd/installer option. Lets give it another go.

Rebooted, now pressing space every few seconds. The CD stopped spinning, maybe it is time now. Enter, F5, 3, Enter . . .

. . . . silence.

Enter again perhaps? Yes, it is doing something now. I wonder what.

CD stopped spinning, no sound at all.

OK, time to cheat a bit and plug in the monitor hopefully when I understand the process I will be able to do it without cheating.

Plugging the monitor in doesn’t power up the monitor and show me the display, presumably it didn’t set up X properly without monitor resolution information.

Right, cheating totally from the start I understand it a bit better, the instructions I googled were wrong, missing an extra enter on the end. Rebooting and lets do it without the monitor.

Power on

Count to 15 from the bios beep (your hardware may vary)

Press space. This goes to the boot menu from previous releases, starting with the language selection.

Press enter to select English (presume you could go up and down to get accessible installs in different languages, but not testing that right now)

Press F5 for Acccessible installation options

Press 3 to highlight the third item in the list which is “screen reader”

Press Enter to choose the highlighted option

Press Enter to start the live CD.

Wait in a silence broken only by the sound of the fan and the CD doing stuff.

. . . nothing

Not really enjoying this any more.

So does it really need a monitor plugged in to do an audio install? Why the heck would I bother with a monitor if I couldn’t see? Why couldn’t it tell me that it has failed because it needs a monitor?

OK, I borrowed the monitor from the kids computer in the playroom and plugged it in, but put it face down on the floor.

Count to 15 and we are off again . . .

Yay, jungle drums. Seems that monitor is essential.

“Welcome to Orca, starting Orca preferences”

“Tab list, general page”

WHAT???

It seems to have dumped me in the Orca preferences page, which goes on forever, with no guidance at all on how to do the install or use Orca? (and anyhow “Welcome to Orca” – didn’t I just start “Ubuntu” did I get the wrong CD?)

up and down seem to let me choose between desktop and laptop – but I think that is an Orca thing, not an install thing.

Tab seems to let me go through a bunch of preference options, but I really have not much idea what preferences I want, I assume the defaults are OK. I wonder if Enter will just select the defaults and let me get on with using the live CD?

“Return Checked” hmm OK

Because I kind of know what I am doing, lets try alt+F2 to run an application

Yup, that works, and I am going to run gedit

After a few spurious audio messages about the orca preferences window, but then gedit was running, I managed to type a little document and save it.

lets browse the applications menu, Alt+F1

yes, that makes sense, I went to the Internet menu, then over to Firefox.

Spurious audio about other windows that are open, then it loads Firefox and tells me there is no internet connection (which there isn’t)

Lets try to actually get to the installer now. I don’t know how to click the icon on the desktop, but I know it is in the menus somewhere, Alt+F1 gets me to the Applications menu, Right to System menu, down twice to the administration menu, right gets me to computer janitor, down to disk utility, down again gparted, again to hardware drivers, once more to Install Ubuntu 10.04 LTS. hmm, that was burried deep. Enter.

“Install frame, Step 1 of 7, Quit Button Forward Button”

hmm, OK. Lets try enter on the forward button. Wonder what else was on that page?

“Install frame, panel”

err, what?

Up and down seems to be a country list, selecting United Kingdom. Enter.

“Window menu”

I seem to be in some other kind of list, might be timezones. I found Europe, then I think I ended up in Belgium, or perhaps the Indian Ocean. Really not sure what is going on there. Tabbed a few times and found the forward button.

ah, now the keyboard

apparently it has suggested one for me, but doesn’t tell me what one it is.

tab gets me into the test box, and shift 3 is # rather than £ so it got the wrong keyboard, shift tab to get back to the selector radio button, I can choose my own, or have it guess. Lets see if it can guess. Tab, “Guess button”, lets press that with space.

Nope that didn’t really work, it didn’t read out the keys it wanted me to press.

Managed to get to the manual selection and find the UK keyboard. and test, shift 3 is now “pound” tabbed to the forward button and lets see what happens next.

OK, this is the partitioning tab, starting to get the hang of the radio buttons now, erasing and using the entire disk. and moving forward.

“What is your name, Text” Tab

passwords are funny, it echos “asterisk” for each keypress

filled out the form without much difficulty

“read only text”

hmm, ok, well read it to me then!

I can’t read the summary, but I can tab to the forward button.

Focus switched back to the Orca preferences window for a second then to the installation progress bar. It should have finished asking me questions now.

While it is doing the install lets think about some conclusions from this experiment.

THIS SUCKS.

And now some more constructive recommendations for improvement.

• Add some help text to the install process, use a really basic command line sound playing application, not a text to speech thing, just something that can play a wav or ogg file with very few dependencies such as aplay. Initally get it to play “press A for an audio install” then just do the boot to the desktop without going through any other menus.
• Get X to start without a monitor and assume something like a 1024×768 desktop, or play a clip when X fails saying “You need to turn the computer on with a monitor plugged in to start the desktop”. Giving no feedback is terrible.

Right, the install has just finished and I am rebooting.

• On booting to the desktop play some text (possibly through the text to speech engine) describing how to operate Orca.
• Tell the user to press Alt+F1 to get to the menu
• Tell the user how to kick off the installer
• Get Orca to read out more of the text on the installer pages.

OK, it has rebooted, and Orca has started, I feared it wouldn’t so this is a good thing.

I have logged in as me. yay.

oh back to the Orca preferences window. boo.

Well the plan for this was to neatly do an install, by using the audio install to save me having to use a monitor, thereby proving that this bit of accessibility technology is a handy tool for everyone to use. In the event I discovered that the accessible install is hard to get to and barely fit for purpose, but I don’t think it is beyond rescue, it just needs to give the user more advice and feedback on what it is doing. If you have a few minutes and a spare computer please have a go at reproducing my little experiment. Put that monitor on the floor or wear a blindfold and install Ubuntu. I can genuinely imagine this being a really useful process on a headless server in a rack with just a set of headphones and a USB keyboard, if only it worked a bit better.

If you want to help make Ubuntu more awesome for everyone who at some point in their life might find an audio install a handy utility then please come and join the Ubuntu Accessibility team .

• Mailing List – ubuntu-accessibility AT lists.ubuntu.com (subscribe) and ubuntu-accessibility-devel AT lists.ubuntu.com (subscribe)
• IRC – #ubuntu-accessibility on freenode
• Wiki: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Accessibility
• Forum http://ubuntuforums.org/forumdisplay.php?f=145

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16:27:12		Alan	Initial Question/Comment: I can’t find your laptops with Ubuntu installed
16:27:23		System	You are now being connected to an agent. Thank you for using Dell Chat
16:27:23		System	Connected with Makrand_Karante
16:27:23		Makrand_Karante	Thank you for contacting Dell sales chat. This is Makrand Karante,your Sales Advisor. In order to Help you better can you provide me with your email address and Telephone number incase we get Disconnected I can either come back to you by phone or email.
16:27:39		Alan	hello
16:27:50		Alan	I am looking for laptops running Ubuntu
16:27:53		Makrand_Karante	Hi Alan
16:28:03		Makrand_Karante	we do not have that option available yet
16:28:15		Alan	oh
16:28:32		Alan	when will they be available, I don’t want Windows at all
16:28:53		Makrand_Karante	we do not have the related information here
16:29:36		Alan	that is a bit of a shame, I will have to go somewhere else to get a laptop then
16:29:53		Makrand_Karante	is there any thing else that I may assist you with today?
16:30:07		Alan	well not really. I just wanted a laptop running Ubuntu.
16:30:19		Alan	Do you have any without an operating system at all?
16:30:28		Makrand_Karante	I am afraid no
16:30:36		Alan	oh
16:31:23		Alan	so if I want a laptop from Dell I have to buy windows
16:31:58		Makrand_Karante	Yes
16:32:12		Alan	ok, thanks for your help
16:32:29		Makrand_Karante	Thank you for contacting Dell Sales Chat and allowing me the opportunity to assist you. Have a wonderful Day ahead.
16:33:25		System	The session has ended!

If you are tempted to go ask similar questions of the Dell online chat thing then go right ahead with the following conditions:
1) You must take a credit card out of your purse/wallet, rest it on your keyboard and be totally prepared to use it, if they find you a suitable laptop.
2) Do it once, don’t repeatedly bother them.
3) Be polite and respectful, the Code of Conduct applies.

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One of the great things about the online community is the speed at which an idea can spread. Barry Smyth, a member of the local community team in Ireland who is working on a masters degree in computing is looking at ways to improve community involvement as a part of his course. He came up with the idea of focusing on one member each day in order to help everyone get to know each other better through a profile of the day project. This seems like a fine idea, so we have picked it up in the UK LoCo and added a few extra twists. In order to document stuff you do relating to Ubuntu everyone can create their own personal page on the Ubuntu Wiki, mine is here so you can see the sort of stuff that goes on it. People can edit other people’s pages if they want, it is a wiki after all. If you like something that someone has done, you can leave them a testimonial on their wiki page. These are looked at when people apply to be an Ubuntu Member or go for a position on any of the various governance boards and committees in the community.

We have now launched Profile Roulette!

This is a game that everyone can play, you can subscribe to the Profile Roulette page to get an email each time the wheel spins, every day it will point to the personal wiki page of someone in the UK LoCo. You can see who the person of the day is, maybe you would like to leave them a testimonial or help them fix up their wiki page in some way. If you want to be on the page then what you have to do is create your personal wiki page (just go to wiki.ubuntu.com/YourName and create a new page there) and at the bottom of the page add the text:

 ----

[[CategoryUKTeamProfile]]

Then when the Profile Roulette wheel spins it might be your turn under the spotlight, don’t forget to subscribe to the Profile Roulette page so you get notified when it is your turn.

If any other LoCo teams want to join in then please feel free to give me a shout in the #ubuntu-locoteams IRC channel on Freenode if you want some help setting up the wiki pages. Once you have got it set up, do add a link to it on the Irish team Profile of the Day page, it helps us find them all and will also help Barry with his degree.

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All are welcome, but if you already count yourself as an Ubuntu user, please drag along a colleague who has yet to see the light!

1pm – Welcome

An introduction to Ubuntu and our community.

1.20 – Ubuntu in action

A selection of case studies of companies using Ubuntu to enhance their business.
Oxford Archaeology

Chris Puttick, Chief Information Officer, will explain how one of the largest independent archaeology and heritage practices in Europe, with over 400 specialist staff, took the strategic decision to adopt an open source infrastructure with Ubuntu at the heart of it.

Emphony Technologies

A start-up software company producing engineering project management and workflow tools decided to deploy Ubuntu as its infrastructure, find out how they got on and their plans for the future.

1.40 – Open Mic

Ubuntu partners and community members (perhaps including you!) tell us how they use Ubuntu in a business context. There will be 5 minute slots with strict timekeeping!

2.15 – Demonstrations, food and networking

Grab some nibbles and see a selection of demonstrations and hands on workshops featuring:

• Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud (Amazon EC2 compatible cloud computing wherever you want it)
• Landscape Systems Management for Ubuntu
• Ubuntu Server Edition
• Social Media for the workplace with WordPress and Ubuntu
• Quick, cheap, easy, low-risk and fun ways to get started with Ubuntu
• Ingres, an enterprise class open source database
• Alfresco document and content management

4.00 – Ubuntu Advantage

The new services from Canonical designed to give your business an edge in its open source strategy.

4.15 – Panel Discussion

A panel with members drawn from Canonical, partners and the community chaired by author and journalist Glyn Moody and loosely following the theme of “The Benefits and Pitfalls of an Open Source Strategy”.

5.00 – Late

Attendees are encouraged to stay on, sample an Ubuntini at the bar, have a chat and enjoy the comedy night hosted by the venue itself.

Your nearest Tube is Aldgate East

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Lets all get together on the 29th on Freenode IRC channel #eurovision for an evening of europop, yes that sounds good to me.

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Methodology and Caveats

• The data assumes “Other” (Independents and small parties such as the Greens and the Pirate Party) win 10% of the national vote, which is a bit high.
• Boundary changes and other issues could well mean we plotted the results of past elections in the wrong place, the seat numbers for the past election are the predicted seat results for this election, not the actuals from the past one.
• Uniform National Swing isn’t the only means of guessing seat results from changes in votes, local issues can change the results in unexpected ways, it is just an approximation
• The data was generated from a series of Python scripts running on Ubuntu Linux, firstly using twill to fill out the form, then beautifulsoup to read the results, finally the output was processed by a script to directly write the SVG files.
• It would be great to see some kind of animated wandering dot that moves about the chart over time with opinion poll results.

Code

This is the initial script that feeds in the values and scrapes the results. It’s output is a kind of messy .csv format which I piped through grep to get rid of lines that were not csv.
from twill.commands import *
from twill import get_browser
from BeautifulSoup import BeautifulSoup
b=get_browser()
for ld in range (91):
for con in range (91-ld):
lab=((90-ld)-con)
#print ld,con,lab
go("http://ukpollingreport.co.uk/blog/swing-calculator")
formvalue("1", "con", con.__str__())
formvalue("1", "lab", lab.__str__())
formvalue("1", "ld", ld.__str__())
submit("0")
results=b.get_html().replace("</SCR'+'IPT>","")#hack to get round weak parser in python 3
soup=BeautifulSoup(results)
conres=soup.table.contents[3].contents[9].string
labres=soup.table.contents[5].contents[9].string
ldres=soup.table.contents[7].contents[9].string
ores=soup.table.contents[9].contents[9].string
outcome=soup.findAll('p','seattitle')[1].string
print '"'+con.__str__()+'","'+lab.__str__()+'","'+ld.__str__()+'","'+conres+'","'+labres+'","'+ldres+'","'+ores+'","'+outcome+'"'
The output of that is here. This was then read back in by the following script, which prints out an SVG file as output. I tweaked it a few times to do the different outputs.
import csv
print """<?xml version="1.0" standalone="no"?>
<!DOCTYPE svg PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD SVG 20010904//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/2001/REC-SVG-20010904/DTD/svg10.dtd">
<svg width="20cm" height="17cm"
xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg">
<desc>Sultans of Swing</desc>
<polygon points="0,0 740,0 370,641" fill="black" />"""

else:
print '<circle cx="'+cx.__str__()+'cm" cy="'+cy.__str__()+'cm" r=".08cm" fill="grey" title="'+tip+'"/>'
print """<line x1="9.8cm" y1="5.596cm" x2= "9.8cm" y2=".4cm" style="stroke: green;"/>"""
print """<line x1="9.8cm" y1="5.596cm" x2= "5.3cm" y2="8.194cm" style="stroke: green;"/>"""
print """<line x1="9.8cm" y1="5.596cm" x2= "14.3cm" y2="8.194cm" style="stroke: green;"/>"""
print"</svg>"

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Hello

Thank you for contacting us regarding 166041 – Lenovo ThinkPad Edge Notebook PC – (via page feedback).

Unfortunately we are unable to supply the unit without OS or refund.

If you would like to purchase this item you can buy online at http://www.misco.co.uk/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=419352&catcode=&sourceid=2911 or call us for free on 0800 294 4516 option 1.

If we can be any further assistance please do not hesitate to contact us on 0800 294 4516, by email at techsupport@misco.co.uk or by fax on 0844 493 5308.

Regards
Lei Zhang
Misco Technical Support

The search goes on.

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Simon Cox:
Now the parties policies on technology probably aren’t not going to influence who gets your vote in the election. While the digital economy bill now may become law, the debate accompanying it’s rather speedy passage through parliament revealed just how little many politicians know about technology. With the economy dominating the campaign how can you find out what your local candidates think, or even know about technology. Well the answer is votegeek, the brainchild of Alan Bell, and he is with me in the studio. Alan, what are you hoping to achieve then through your site?
Alan Bell:
Well we have got a dual aim really, one half of it is to get the geeky type personality more interested in politics, and get people to understand that politics matters to them. The second aim is to get the candidates aware that we exist and that we are voters too.
SC:
What are the issues that people are wanting to focus on with candidates, presumably it is not just about broadband speed?
AB:
No, it is a wide range of issues, we are not focussing on a single issue, but we are focussing on a single topic. So there are issues such as the use of Free Software in the public sector. Public procurement policy, digital freedom, privacy, and censorship are definitely topic areas of interest.
SC:
In terms of the candidates you have been contacting what kind of reaction have you been getting from them?
AB:
A very positive reaction from some of them, and a lack of response from others! We have had responses from all the major parties, and a number of the minor parties. I was particularly pleased with a comment from the Official Monster Raving Loony Party for instance!
SC:
Are they surprised when you contact them?
AB:
The Official Monster Raving Loony Party gentleman was yes! But I would say it is not just me and my group of helpers that are contacting people, we are asking people out there to go and find their constituency on the site, look at the candidates that are available for them to vote for, and then contact their candidates. So the message to the candidates is coming from one of their constituents. There is then a comment area where people can record emails and letters they have sent to their candidates and also responses they have received back.
SC:
So it is trying to build up a profile is it on their views on particular technology issues?
AB:
Yes, it is allowing people to share information about their candidates views.
SC:
Now Rupert, what do you think about this, I mean with the Digital Economy Bill the politicians didn’t really cover themselves in glory did they?
Rupert Goodwins:
Well following the Digital Economy Bill closely was quite an eye opener for me, because not only did it transpire that the politicians didn’t know what they were talking about, but they didn’t quite realise why it was being rushed through so quickly, and this is an important part of anyone who wants to be an active democrat because you can’t be good at democracy unless you are informed. Things like votegeek mean that we can get much more involved and force politicians to be more serious about their jobs and that is an excellent thing.
SC:
What about the way that technology is being used during the campaign, we are always hearing that this is the election where we are suddenly going to see technology really beginning to take off, have you been struck at all by way it is being used?
RG:
Well yes there was the big debate, well the first of the debates between the three candidates for Prime Minister and if you were online whilst watching that there were lots and lots and lots of people talking away on twitter, blogs and instant messaging. There was an awful lot of debate going on at the same time which never happened before. The most important thing about politics is to be involved and to be informed and technology is allowing that to happen in a new way for the first time.
SC:
Alan Bell, thanks a lot for that, and Rupert thanks to you too.

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So now I have a nearly finished Oggcamp theme which adapts when it sees you searching for #oggcamp, #ubuntu, #lo, #shotofjaq or #uupc. If I missed out any interesting hashtags then do let me know. Screenshot below is it running fullscreen on my 2048×1152 monitor. In reality it would be tracking two of them on a 1024×768 projector, but this shows all the hash pipe themes together, click to go large.

I will be pushing up a bzr branch of all this so you can play with it in the comfort of your own home or your own conference. If you have further suggestions, or want to help tweak it a bit more, then give me a shout in the comments.

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