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

[Jude DaShiell <jdashiel shellworld net>]

you could use emacspeak and I wrote earlier about nmh, emacs has an mh.elc 
program that can be added to a .emacs file and once that's done you have 
the full accessibility to nmh and the power that that confers.  It does 
handle mime attachments too with an additional program but that's all in 
the documentation.  Nice thing about emacspeak is like orca, it'll be a 
desktop environment. On Fri, 18 Nov 2011, 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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Jude <jdashiel-at-shellworld-dot-net>
<http://www.shellworld.net/~jdashiel/nj.html>