Re: [orca-list] popularity of orca and brltty

[Jason White <jason jasonjgw net>]

Josh <jkenn337 gmail com> wrote:
> You know I've noticed that this list is flourishing and the blinux list has
> far far fewer postings. Most people on the blinux list are text console
> users who use speakup or yasr mostly speakup though. So my question is this,
> is graphical Linux the way of the future for the most part? And is its
> popularity due to its ease of use? 

Blinux-list hasn't been very active for quite a while, based on my checking of
their archives occasionally, but project-specific lists (Orca, Speakup,
Emacspeak, BRLTTY, etc.) are much more alive.

For me, the various modes of access are really a matter of expanding the range
of choices available. If what I want to do is best accomplished with an X
application, for example FireFox, and it is accessible with Orca, then this is
what I use. If my preferred application is Emacs-based or console-based, then
I use the appropriate accessibility solution for that domain. These aren't
mutually exclusive options, and they're all important.

This isn't like the move from DOS to Windows in the 1990s. Text applications
and tools aren't dying away; in fact, it is common for the GUI versions to be
wrapped around the command line tools, as in Lyx and LaTeX for example, or CD
burning applications that run mkisofs and cdrecord/wodim.

The point of relevance to this list is that Orca is an important component of
the over-all accessibility infrastructure.

As to ease of use, that's a very relative and often subjective notion. For
example, I find that for filling in forms which require a lot of text entry,
Firefox is difficult to use, in that it insists on using its own, very
primitive, editing functionality instead of behaving as good Unix tools do by
allowing an external editor such as Emacs or Vi to be invoked. This feels like
stepping backward in time to the PC environment that I abandoned years ago
when DOS was rapidly disappearing.