Speaker
Description
GNOME's accessibility support is genuinely good — Orca has been around since 2006 and it's one of the more mature screen readers in the FLOSS world. But "mature" mostly means mature for English. I wanted to find out what happens when you try to use it in a language that almost nobody has tested it in.
I picked Nepali, my own language, spoken by over 30 million people, and started digging. I went through the whole pipeline that makes Orca talk — speaking pronunciation rules, speech-dispatcher, and Orca's own text handling — to see where things actually break. Some of it was what I expected. Some of it wasn't.
I also talked to Nepali-speaking screen reader users directly — because for someone who relies on Orca every day to read email, do schoolwork, or apply for a job, a mispronounced word isn't a minor bug, it's a barrier.
In this talk I'll walk through what I found, [what I ended up fixing/filing upstream], and what the process of contributing to a project like Orca actually looks like for someone doing it for the first time. My hope is that this isn't just a talk about Nepali — it's a nudge for anyone in the room whose language GNOME hasn't gotten to yet.
Author(s) Bio
Abhishek Kushwaha is a Computer Science student, He is Python-Django developer and also a Python instructor.
Talk Description
GNOME's accessibility support is genuinely good — Orca has been around since 2006 and it's one of the more mature screen readers in the FLOSS world. But "mature" mostly means mature for English. I wanted to find out what happens when you try to use it in a language that almost nobody has tested it in.
I picked Nepali, my own language, spoken by over 30 million people, and started digging. I went through the whole pipeline that makes Orca talk — speaking pronunciation rules, speech-dispatcher, and Orca's own text handling — to see where things actually break. Some of it was what I expected. Some of it wasn't.
I also talked to Nepali-speaking screen reader users directly — because for someone who relies on Orca every day to read email, do schoolwork, or apply for a job, a mispronounced word isn't a minor bug, it's a barrier.
In this talk I'll walk through what I found, [what I ended up fixing/filing upstream], and what the process of contributing to a project like Orca actually looks like for someone doing it for the first time. My hope is that this isn't just a talk about Nepali — it's a nudge for anyone in the room whose language GNOME hasn't gotten to yet.
| Category | Design of Users and Developer Experiences |
|---|---|
| Pronouns | He/Him |
| Where are you located? | Kathmandu, Nepal |
| Do you need travel sponsorship from GNOME Foundation in order to join our event? | Yes |