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

[Jacob Schmude <j schmude gmail com>]

Hi
Yes, Openoffice does have some issues translating back and forth but then again, even different versions of 
Microsoft's own office don't always translate back and forth very well. Take a word doc done in Office XP and 
open it up in Office 2007 and sometimes the formatting will still be completely off. Even Microsoft can't 
always keep up with their own changing formats.
I do have to say, I find OO Writer's accessibility with Orca to be better than Word's accessibility in 
Windows in a lot of areas. I can't say the same for the rest of OpenOffice however. Impress, especially, 
needs some very serious work.


On Jan 14, 2010, at 14:32, Peter Torpey wrote:

> 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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