Re: [orca-list] JAWS or Orca?

["Peter Torpey" <ptorpey rochester rr com>]

Bill,

I have used JAWS for Windows ever since its inception in the early 90's.
Been in a corporate environment, this was essential for communications,
interacting with co-workers, etc.

However, as a research scientist and programmer, I did all of my development
work in Unix.  Of course, at that time, Unix did not have any of the
accessibility enhancements that many of the flavors of Linux now have (such
as Orca, brltty, etc.).  Thus, I used my Windows PC running a terminal
emulator to log into to my Unix box and did all of my C programming and
development within a terminal session.  This worked quite well.  I even put
together special scripts for JAWS (which are available on the web some
place, but I haven't used them in years) so that JAWS would work a bit
better for my programming needs in the terminal emulator and using editors
such as vi.

Recently, since I now see that Linux has integrated accessibility reasonably
well, I installed Ubuntu 9.04 and started using Orca and brltty.  I'm
impressed at how well Orca works, but, not surprisingly, it is not nearly as
robust and/or responsive as JAWS running on windows.  I believe you could
probably do all of your work in Linux directly since there seems to be
enough functionality there (and it's still improving thanks to the great
efforts of the Linux developers), but if my job depended on it, I would
probably still opt to use JAWS and Windows as a front end to Linux.  As I
said, JAWS is a lot more robust, flexible, and snappy than Orca, but at
least we have reasonable choices these days (which weren't available years
ago).

All that being said, Linux has come a long way in terms of accessibility
over the years and is at least a reasonable alternative these days.

--Pete

-----Original Message-----
From: orca-list-bounces gnome org [mailto:orca-list-bounces gnome org] On
Behalf Of Bill Cox
Sent: Friday, June 19, 2009 2:51 PM
To: orca-list gnome org
Subject: [orca-list] JAWS or Orca?

Sorry for this obnoxious first post!

I'm a programmer who is slowly losing central vision.  I probably have
2-5 years of reasonable reading left.  I've decided to be proactive
and begin learning how to program with poor vision.  I've been hacking
in Linux for a few years now, and I absolutely love it.  I hate the
thought of going back to windows, but JAWS seems to be more mature
than Orca.  On the other hand, I hate losing control over my
environment, which will be especially important as I lose vision.  I
would also like to contribute code to improve computer accessibility,
which means Linux, not Windows, SFAIK.

I've talked to one blind programmer who can listen to is JAWS based
reader comfortably at over 500wpm, far faster than I can read.  Do
Orca users achieve similar productivity?  In the end, I feel I should
go with the most productive environment I can find.

Thanks,
Bill
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