Re: [orca-list] JAWS or Orca?

[Krishnakant <hackingkk gmail com>]

On Mon, 2009-06-22 at 11:49 +0200, Mattia Scattolin wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I use linux with orca and brltty for my job as programmer.
>
> I use emacs as text editor and a lot of text based utilities.
>
> Orca isn't as powerfull as Jaws but it's free and  it's growing very fast.
>
> At the moment orca gives my the opportunity to do all I need and, in my 
> opinion, it offers better braille accessibility than jaws dows (I don't 
> use speech).
>
> bye
>
> Mattia
>
>
>
> On 06/20/2009 01:11 PM, Alastair Irving wrote:
> > Hi
> >
> > I personally find emacspeak to be very productive for writing code.   
> > It has quite a steep learning curve, especially if you're unfamiliar 
> > with emacs, but the results are, in my opinion, definitely worthwhile.
> >
> > Also, you don't necesarily have to make a firm decision between 
> > windows and linux as you can run one inside a virtual machine on the 
> > other, (assuming you have enough memory).
> >
> > Alastair Irving
> > Bill Cox wrote:
> > > 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.

Today orca does all the things which 90% of the people do on a computer.
There might be some features which a certain proprietory software has,
But firstly almost all the features are some advanced  things which give
an added user experience.  One can work with it (jaws 6 was what orca is
today ).

The other thing is that orca like all other free software projects has
no stagnation and will improve at a much faster rate than any
proprietory screen reader.
Orca in last 2 years has come to the level where jaws came only after 5
+ years.

And today I use orca for all my computing tasks including writing
documents, creating spreadsheets,  surffing the net, reading and writing
emails, programming and many other things.

There are a few doable enhancements which will make the user experience
even better and I am confident that given the feedback on this mailing
list, those changes will come very soon.  Untill then I dont' think
there is some thing in orca persay which restricts a user to do or not
do some thing.


happy hacking.
Krishnakant.