Orca/C2/Advanced-Settings/English
Advanced orca settings hello and welcome to this tutorial on the series on orca. Till now we have seen how orca assists in performing mundane tasks on the desktop. However we are seeing just the tip of the ice burg! There are many more customisations we can do to Orca and make it more responsive. In this tutorial we are going to look at some important settings which come very handy when working on the desktop. So let's start orca. I will press alt + f2 and then type orca and hit enter. Now we will open the orca preferences. I will press insert + space or capslog + space for opening the preferences dialog. If you have gone through the tutoril on Adjusting speech through preferences dialog, YOu will recall that there are many tabs or what are called as pages in this window. The settings we are going to learn this time will be in the speech tab. So right now we are on the general page and pressing the right arrow will take us to the speech page. The settings we are going to learn will make orca more responsive and provide important audio feedback about our activities. Lets get to work right away. As we had seen in the tutorial on Adjusting speech through preferences dialog, we have settings for enabling speech, selecting the speech system, the speech synthesizer etc. Lets tab through these options quickly. We can also set the language as you know through the person dropdown. Furthermore, we will tab through the settings for adjusting speed, that is rate, pitch and volume. I will also quickly tab across the punctuation and verbosity option. Now the next option is about how orca reads data in the table. We will come to this option later on when we encounter tabulated data. The next 3 options are related to progress bars. A progress bar is some thing which comes up when we perform a long task such as copying a file or downloading some thing from the net. These options will make sense when we do related activities so lets quickly tab through these options as well and locate the speak blank lines option. This option is a very obvious one. If this check box is checked, then orca will say the word "blank " if it encounters a blank line. Press tab again. The next option is to tell orca if we want it to announce text indentation/justification. You can toggle it as you like. We will see the effect of this setting after we finish looking at all the options at hand. Now tab till you find the option that says "speak multi case strings as words" This is a check box which you can toggle. If it is checked, then it means words with mixed capital and small letters will be pronounced as a single word. For example, N M E I C T will be pronounced as "Nmiket". Now press tab. We find the next Item to be Speak Object Numonics which we had seen in the orca preferences tutorials. Tab again to find the speak tutorial messages. This too was explained in the same tutorial on Orca preferences. Press tab to find the next option. The option in focus right now is to tell Orca that we need to know how many items are present in a list or group of selections. Now lets press tab to move on to the next item in the speech tab. This option means if it is checked, then orca will take a proper long and short pause for fullstops and commas respectively. Press the tab key again. Now orca takes us to a dropdown titled say all by. The default setting is sentence. You can press the up arrow and see the other option. This option will tell Orca to break speech at every line. Programmers find it comfortable to have orca pause at every line. But when we read an article or a book, we want Orca to pause at every sentence. So lets set it back to sentence by pressing the down arrow. Now press tab till you get to the apply button. Hit enter and confirm your changed settings. You will be able to see the effects of the changes right away. Press tab till you hear the title of this page. As you heard, Orca told us that we are on the second item out of 8. This means that there are 8 pages in the preferences dialog box and we are focused on the second one right now. So what about other changes. Well we will just have a look at them in a while. Press shift + tab to locate the OK button and hit enter to close the preferences dialog. Now to see the effects of the changes we made, let's create a simple text file in Gedit text editor. Open the applications menu using the key combination alt + f1. Now lets press the down arrow once to locate the Accessories menu. We will use the right arrow to open the Accessories menu and locate the gedit text editor. Locate the editor by down arrow and hit enter. Now we have a blank text editor. Let's enter some text. Enter the first line - "This file is for examining how orca provides information on text attributes." Now hit enter 2 times. This results into a blank line just below the line we wrote. Now write another line. I will type the following text - "Orca responds on any event including blank spaces." Remember, we had set orca to signel us if there is a blank line. The "speek blank lines" check box was in the speech tab in the preferences and we had checked it. So now, press up arrow. There you are! Orca tells us that we are on a blank line. Now lets do something interesting. As you may recall, we had checked the checkbox for speak indentation and justification. Let's do a simple experiment to see how Orca responds to indented text. Suppose we want to make a hierarchy denoting the location of my city, Mumbai. We know that India is in the continent Asia and Mumbai is in India. So lets write this down. First, hit enter. Now, write "Asia" and hit enter. Since India is under Asia, we will press one tab to indent the nation's name. So press tab and type "India". Again press enter for the next line. Now Mumbai is suppose to come under India so press tab 2 times and type "Mumbai". Now go 3 lines up and start reading. Come down again. Did you hear how Orca responds when it encounters indentation? Well, that's it for this tutorial. The text we typed actually was for testing the responses of Orca for the settings we just did in the speech tab. Close the text editor by going to the file menu and then locating the "Quit" button by hitting the up arrow. Of course Orca responded by telling us that text editor is warning us about we not saving the file before closing. Tab to close without saving and hit enter. So I hope by now you have become more comfortable using Orca. Until the next tutorial, This is Niket and Duhita signing off. Spoken Tutorials are a part of the Talk to a Teacher project, supported by the National Mission on Education through ICT coordinated by www.spoken-tutorial.org and developed at IIT Bombay. More information on the same is available at the following link http://spoken-tutorial.org/NMEICT- Intro.
