Re: Orca and Acrobat

[Willie Walker <William Walker 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.

Those "just work" words are mine.  The assumption there was that if
Acrobat worked well with Gnopernicus, then the AT-SPI implementation was
good and it should work well with other assistive technologies.  

At one point, Acrobat worked with Gnopernicus - I even saw/heard it, and
it was great to see Adobe take such a good step to support
accessibility. Support for accessibility broke somewhere along the line,
however, and we notified the Adobe team about it a while back.  My words
in the Orca v1.0 release were based upon the assumption that we'd be
seeing something soon from Adobe.

Like anything, the squeaky wheel gets the grease.  Perhaps members from
the community can help raise the awareness of the need for accessible
support in Acrobat by logging constructive support requests with Adobe?

As an alternative, the GNOME 'evince' project may have some promise.  It
is lacking in accessible text support, but the rest of it seems to do
well with Orca.  If an industrious sole (or group) were able to look at
adding accessible text support to evince, it might become a viable
solution for PDF access.

Hope this helps,

Will