[Sugar-devel] Accessibility: using VMG on the XO1

[Andrea Mangiatordi]

Hi everybody,
I am working on accessibility related problems on Sugar. I have spent 
some months in Uruguay working with children with special needs and now 
I am trying to organize the information I collected there. I would like 
to share with you some hacks and ideas.

Here is the first post of a series.

There's an interesting magnifier project at magnifier.sourceforge.net 
which can be installed in any Fedora using yum or downloading the rpm 
package from the project website. Binding it to a key using xbindkeys 
allows to have magnification of the part of the screen which is under 
the mouse, so that it can be used everywhere in sugar.

How to?

Follow this in terminal on a XO:

sudo yum install magnifier xbindkeys
echo "# Virtual Magnifying Glass" >> .xbindkeysrc
echo \"vmg\" >> .xbindkeysrc
echo "F13" >> .xbindkeysrc
echo "keycode 224 = F13" >> xmodmap.conf
echo "xmodmap xmodmap.conf" >> .xsession
echo "xbindkeys" >> .xsession

and then restarting sugar.

This dirty hack sets the "vmg" command to be launched when the second 
key (from right!) on the top row is pressed.

I know it is not an optimal solution, but I think it could be 
interesting to consider something like this for Sugar.

This magnifier can be enlarged using the arrow keys and theoretically 
the magnification ratio could be changed using + and - (doesn't work on 
my XO).

Any idea on how to make it work better?

Andrea


-- 
Andrea Mangiatordi

www.farfalla-project.org
www.bglug.it