[orca-list] Thunderbird issues and Evolution contacts

[Nolan Darilek <nolan thewordnerd info>]

I've been using Shredder for a while, but recently switched back to
Evolution due to instability. As someone else noted on this list
recently, navigating Shredder's messages view table seemed painfully
slow, and since I wasn't sure where the issue was and didn't feel like
running alpha software, I switched back to Evolution. Message-scrolling
is much snappier, and various system stability issues I'd been
experiencing seem to have gone away somewhat. I don't know whether the
message-scrolling issue is related to the AT infrastructure and have no
way to test whether Orca being run causes it or not, but it often took a
second or more to scroll between messages or mailboxes.

I'm mostly happy with Evolution, only I notice that the contacts view is
very inaccessible, and I'm wondering if this is a known issue or if
there are any workarounds? There seems to be no way to reliably access
info on a contact as there is an inaccessible panel. I've tried
switching the contacts view to list from card, and that at least enables
scrolling through contacts, but sometimes headers are spoken while at
other times contact info speaks. It's difficult to explain--sometimes
the header for "business phone" will speak when I arrow to a contact,
while at others a phone number will be spoken instead of a random column
header. I'm guessing this is an issue with Evolution, but I'm wondering
if it's known? Thunderbird's contacts app seems very accessible, but I'd
like to avoid TB until it becomes more stable and less
resource-intensive, and Evolution seems better integrated into the gnome
desktop and various sync facilities.

Failing an accessible Evolution contacts mode, can anyone recommend an
accessible and well-integrated contacts management app? I just synced my
phone and dumped my old address book from my mac and would like to
manage the list on open source technology prior to switching and syncing
with a new phone, but I'm not sure of an accessible means of doing this.