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Re: [orca-list] Accessible email clients; really need an alternative to thunderbird

I would suggest mutt anyway but you said you can't use speakup.
That's really too bad.  I thought speakup worked on just about any
linux machine.  I agree that Orca and mail clients is a bad
combination lately.  I think with the gnome 3 implimentation this
spring, accessibility has gone backwards rather than forwards.
Numerous improvements have supposedly been made in some of the
foundation classes like gtk... but yet for an end user, it seems like
more stuff is broken now than before.

Anyway, another mail solution, though not pretty, could be to use web
based mail services like gmail as long as you donh't use the standard
view.  But then you have to use the Firefox browser which many are
having trouble with.  In some ways though, Firefox performs better
than thunderbird in Linux now days.  This is surprising because older
versions of Thunderbird actually worked pretty well and often better
than the windows counterparts but now the windows version appears to
work better than the current linux versions.  What is going on here
anyhow?


On 11/18/11, Michael Whapples <mwhapples aim com> wrote:

I wouldn't put too much hope on seamonkey being any better, its another
Mozilla based product using XUL like Thunderbird and many of the warts are
in layers like XUL which is common across Mozilla products.

Michael Whapples
On 18 Nov 2011, at 16:59, Tami Kinney wrote:


Michael,

I am on a similar quest for similar reasons.

I did read that Ubuntu would not be supporting Evolution (or something to
that effect) starting with the Oneiric release, so...

With the upgrade to Oneiric, Evolution has stopped talking to me. I've
been using Thunderbird but have decided I just don't need the frustration!
/smile/

I'm downloading Seamonkey and mutt just to see what happens. I will keep
the list posted as to how those work with Orca on Oneiric.

If anyone else has discovered an e-mail client that works well for them,
please tell us about it! /smile/

Tami

On 11/18/2011 03:06 AM, Michael Whapples wrote:

Hello,
I know I have written about this before, but I never really found a
satisfactory alternative. So as a last try I will try and be very
specific in what I am looking for.

OK, as many will know I really am not happy with the quality of
accessibility in Thunderbird, Mozilla just don't seem to be able to deal
with the problems and accessibility requirements seem to be a second rate
citizen (justification: Some of the accessibility issues are so obvious
and critical to use, that should a non-disabled user be faced with such
issues they would never make a release of Mozilla products, an example
being Orca echoing the text being entered in edit fields, would
non-disabled users stand for not knowing what they typed, why should
we?). There are other quality issues I have with Thunderbird but we'll
leave those for now.

Now to the positive look on things, what alternatives are there?
Evolution normally is the obvious one. Yes I have used it back in the
past (back in the gnome 2.18 and 2.20 days. While I could use it then, to
me it always felt like its usability lay somewhere between difficult or
clumsy. Some of the specific issues were finding attachments, being able
to open individual messages in list digest messages as an attachment
(like I can in Outlook Express on windows or Thunderbird) so I can reply
to individual messages rather than the digest one and also evolution can
feel like its interface is just a bit cluttered as it has calender and
other features I do not tend to use (see below for what I really would
want from an email client). If anyone could point me to good
documentation on using evolution (particularly as an orca user and using
evolution from the keyboard, may be my problems with evolution could be
overcome as I might be able to use it more efficiently.

Another alternative which has been suggested to me is balsa, but I never
really got to grips with that.

I know that another alternative might be to look at text based clients.
The only ones I really got on with were pine and cone. Anyway, I feel
text base clients may be off the cards as I feel Orca isn't great with
text based software. Speakup would be my preferred choice for screen
reader with text based software, however it just doesn't load on the
computers I would install Linux on.

OK, here is what I am looking from the email client:
Accessible with Orca: As I noted speakup doesn't work on my Linux systems
so Orca is what I will be using, so in my opinion that rules out the text
based clients.
Simple interface, focused on what is wanted: I only really want it for
mail, things like calenders are just a waste of space to me. The main
places I use in the email client is the folder/account tree and the
message list. More than that in the main view is more than I want, I may
find search useful but I don't mind going to the menu for that.
Multiple account support: It should support more than one account, with
different outgoing servers for each account.
Ability to access the individual messages in a mail digest: I have most
of my list subscriptions set to digest (eg. that is how I have the orca
list set) but I have it set to mime for the format. This means that in
Outlook Express on windows and thunderbird on Linux I can access each
individual message sent to the list by viewing the attachments of the
main digest message. This works quite well to keep things tidy. May be
rules could help here and that I could receive separate messages and use
rules to separate them into folders, but unless that is done on the
server I need to set up those rules on every computer (undesirable
thought) and I am unsure whether I could set these rules on the server.

I think that covers the main things. Any suggestions.

Thanks in advance.

Michael Whapples
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Visit http://live.gnome.org/Orca for more information on Orca.
The manual is at
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_______________________________________________
orca-list mailing list
orca-list gnome org
http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/orca-list
Visit http://live.gnome.org/Orca for more information on Orca.
The manual is at
http://library.gnome.org/users/gnome-access-guide/nightly/ats-2.html
The FAQ is at http://live.gnome.org/Orca/FrequentlyAskedQuestions
Log bugs and feature requests at http://bugzilla.gnome.org
Find out how to help at http://live.gnome.org/Orca/HowCanIHelp
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