Re: [orca-list] Using Linux for everyday computing tasks and employment

["Peter Torpey" <ptorpey00 gmail com>]

I never got anywhere near that many messages in my Inbox using Thunderbird
since I was only testing for system for a short while and not doing all of
my work there.  So, I don't know if what you are talking about is an Orca
issue or, more likely, some kind of memory limitation for memory/buffering
management problem.

I have heard that even sighted users have some issues with Open Office and
trading word documents with other folks who use Microsoft Office.  They seem
to lose some formatting in the translation from one to another.  I thought
Open Office dealt more cleanly with these issues, but its hard to keep up
with the Microsoft changing specs.

Maybe someday I will switch to Linux full-time, but there are still some
commercial applications which I use for musical editing (such as Cakewalk's
Sonar and PG Music's Band-in-a-Box) on a Windows platform.

> From my limited use of Linux, however, it is very snappy and fast to boot
compared with Windows.

--Pete


-----Original Message-----
From: Krishnakant [mailto:hackingkk gmail com] 
Sent: Thursday, January 14, 2010 4:18 PM
To: ptorpey00 gmail com
Cc: 'John G. Heim'; Orca-list gnome org
Subject: Re: [orca-list] Using Linux for everyday computing tasks and
employment

On Thu, 2010-01-14 at 11:22 -0500, Peter Torpey wrote:
> John,
>
> Have you tried Thunderbird in Linux?  I played around with this about 6
> months ago and found Thunderbird to be much more accessible than
Evolution.
>
Hey, May be this will soon become another thread, but can you plese tell
me the size of your inbox?
I have about 96000 mails in my inbox and the file is about 1 gb.
Now when I start thunderbird 3.0 on my laptop, I find that after I tab
from inbox to the message list, orca just stops speaking.
I did not see this when my mail box was smaller with hardly 100 emails.

Is the the problem of mozila accessibility or with orca.  Who ever it
is, I think this is buffering problem.
 
> I used Unix for many years as my main development platform, before all the
> accessibility enhancements to Linux.  At that time, I used a Windows PC as
a
> front end to the Unix box by running a terminal emulator from within
> Windows.  I'm amazed to see how far Linux has come since then in terms of
> accessibility.
If you are a typical office computer user using spreadsheets for daily
work, surff regular sites like google, twitter or facebook, chat using
google or yahoo, then orca is more than enough.
If you do coding, it is great.  Word processor gives you all the
accessibility you need but for some 20% of features which you will never
need for 80% of your work.

I make presentations in html with one good template which I downloaded
from the net, so that solves my presentation problem.

Most often than not I use LaTeX which is very easy and can help blind
person to generate richly formatted articles and reports by just
remembering about 15 tags.

> Of course there still needs to be a bunch of work done to make Linux
> accessibility more robust (such as being able to install and configure by
a
> blind person out of the box, conflicts of audio and speech drivers and
> interfaces, etc.), but its incredible how accessible Linux is these days.
I think once the audio conflict being talked about offlate is fixt, we
have one of the best accessible OS till date.
And yes I hope in coming 4 or 5 months openoffice and firefox will have
state-of-the-art accessibility with orca.


Happy hacking.
Krishnakant.


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