Re: [orca-list] netbeans accessibility

[Michael Whapples <mwhapples aim com>]

Hello,
My answer is that it potentially could be good but there is a big 
limitation, orca responds painfully slow with it when I have tried it in 
the past.

Why I say that it potentially could be good is that when I have tried it 
with orca and waited around for orca to respond it does seem to read 
things reasonably well and also when I have tried netbeans with screen 
readers on other platforms some of them did seem reasonably good. As I 
said orca is painfully slow to respond in netbeans, as memory goes in 
some cases more than a minute, so that alone makes netbeans not really 
practical for use.

As a side note, I think netbeans uses java swing for the user interface, 
therefore you either need the java access bridge or java atk wrapper 
installed. I don't know whether this contributes to the slow response by 
orca as it is bridging to another accessibility API.

You asked whether anyone is working on this, the answer is sort of, have 
a look at the sodbeans http://sodbeans.sf.net project.I say sort of as 
it doesn't seem like they are solving the issue by correcting the 
existing tools, but rather creating a plugin to make netbeans accessible 
(looks like by making netbeans self voicing, I don't know whether when 
they say about it make it work with screen readers whether they mean 
just use the screen reader for speech output like firevox plugin did 
with orca, IE. whether using any of their stuff will allow one to work 
with netbeans using a Braille display).

At the moment I would say the best accessible IDE for java and python is 
eclipse. Look at the pydev plugin for python support.

I know some sighted people have said to me that they prefer netbeans, so 
I know why you may want to try it out.

Hope some of that is useful.

Michael Whapples
On -10/01/37 20:59, hackingKK wrote:
> Hello all.
> Has any one got any experience using Netbeans with Orca.
> If it is inaccessible then I think some one has to take this up.
> To the best of my knowledge, it works very wel for Java and Python.
> So would be interested to know how well it does with Orca.
>
> happy hacking.
> Krishnakant.