Re: [orca-list] Page presentation issues

[Garrett Klein <garrettklein comcast net>]

On Sat, 2008-05-17 at 21:31 +1000, Daniel Dalton wrote:
> On Sat, 17 May 2008, Hermann wrote:
>
> > I don't think your Americans are that poor, so don't talk this way.
> > Each of you has a Windows, otherwise you were not able to state anything
> > about its usefulness/uselessness.
>
> I use it occationally at school, but don't have a working version at home, 
> so how am I meant to test?
>
> And no I'm not going to buy windows and a licence to test something I 
> don't care about.
> I use linux, so why do I need to compare it to other operating systems? 
> Wouldn't I be better off helping the project instead of testing out 
> windows and telling the orca developers about this?

Regardless, I think we can learn some valuable lessons from the Windows
screen readers, even if we don't like some of the approaches taken in
them (i.e. virtual buffering of webpages). There seems to be this
attitude of, "Oh, well Windows does it, therefore we should steer clear
of it and do the exact opposite!" Keep in mind, a lot of people
switching to Linux are used to how windows screen readers do things ...
after all, how annoying would it be if gnome didn't use common shortcuts
like alt-f4?

Windows may be evil from a free software standpoint, but that doesn't
make accessibility ideas in it bad. In fact, I'd say that sometimes free
software idealism holds us back in this regard. "Oh, it's in windows,
the idea is automatically bad, let's get back to talking about orca."

Okay, that's been bothering me for a long time. I'll stop ranting now.

Garrett
> > And BTW.: Paying about $800 for Jaws isn't that much, compared with the
> > $2500 for a Jaws in Germany, and who complains?!
>
> I'm in Australia, but $800? Wow, that is a lot for a piece of software. 
> That I hear has lots bugs, all these people complaining about inaccessible 
> apps. So what a waste?
> Wouldn't I be better off spending that money on hardware?
> That could get me a decent box in Australia.
>
> Anyway, I use linux for everything, documents, emails, web, music, irc, 
> msn, programming and ftp.
> So why would I bother with windows?
> I'm actually about to delete the windows partition my computer came with.
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