Re: Orca and Acrobat

[Peter Korn <Peter Korn Sun COM>]

Hi Henrik,

> Sorry if this has been asked before. In the Orca 1.0 release 
> announcement I can read that Orca should 'just work' with the 'fixed' 
> version of Acrobat. Are there plans for making this enhanced version the 
> standard. If not we should look into providing the enhanced version of 
> Acrobat as the standard or as an option.

Adobe did a bunch of work a couple of years ago to make Adobe Reader for 
Linux and Solaris SPARC support the UNIX accessibility framework.  They 
tested this work with the only screen reader we had back then - 
Gnopernicus - and we had a fair amount working pretty well.  Gnopernicus 
was able to track the caret to read PDF text, to track focus to read PDF 
forms, and screen magnification tracked right along with the caret and 
focus.

Unfortunately subsequent releases of Adobe Reader have since broken this 
support.  The current versions of Adobe Reader fail to work with Orca, 
as well as Gnopernicus.  Adobe is aware of these issues, and we hope 
that they will fix the problems in their next release.

Regards,

Peter Korn
Accessibility Architect,
Sun Microsystems, Inc.