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

Hello,
I have tried evolution and here are some of the things I am finding. Please note that I am using evolution 
3.2.2 and as of this evening I have upgraded to Orca from git.

First problem, evolution keeps crashing on me: I am not fully sure what causes it but even just moving around 
the folder/account tree view can crash it (not all the time but fairly frequently. Might Orca be doing 
something here to cause such a crash? I could never imagine this would happen normally as I get a crash 
normally within a minute or two of using evolution and normally within a few key presses when navigating in 
that tree view.

I seem to be unable to find the message list: May be I have over slimmed down what is shown but showing extra 
stuff always seems to add much more than I want and I am unconvinced that it adds the message list anyway 
(IE. I would imagine what I have configured would have the message list showing). When I press tab I find the 
following items; the account/folder tree view (side pane or whatever it is called in the view menu), the 
search options (eg. the boxes for which messages to show, search box, etc) and then there is one control 
where nothing is said. In case its because my inbox is so large that it is taking time for evolution to get 
the messages I decided to go to a folder with only a few messages but still this element is silent.

The Orca wiki information on accessible applications seem to be fairly dated (eg. it refers to firefox 3). 
The evolution page on the Orca wiki said very little related to the issues I am having.

Anything I can do to improve things?

Michael Whapples
On 19 Nov 2011, at 18:59, Tami Kinney wrote:


I would go back to Evolution in a heartbeat, but just haven't managed to find the time since the upgrade to 
Oneiric to troubleshoot the reason it isn't talking to me anymore. Sigh.

Please do share what you learn in your quest! I plan to do more experiementing when/as I have the time but 
have so far come up with nothhing useful to report. /smile/

Tami


On 11/19/2011 02:08 AM, Michael Whapples wrote:

As memory goes, thunderbird 3.1.x has issues of its own, but may be I am
wrong. Also are you using it with gnome 3.2? I know that the at-spi2
stuff has affected how older application behave.

Yes evolution is feeling the best alternative, but it doesn't feel a
great one. May be as you said it can be customised and that is why I
asked about documentation on using it with Orca and from the keyboard in
case there is something I have missed which does make it better.

Michael Whapples
On -10/01/37 20:59, Christopher Chaltain wrote:

I use Thunderbird 3.1.15, and I don't think I'm running into the
problems you're describing. I know it isn't the latest and greatest, but
it's still what I'm running on my Ubuntu 11.04 system, and I haven't
noticed any new features I can't live without or any major bugs. In
fact, I prefer using Thunberbird 3.1.15 on Ubuntu over any Windows email
client. I would assume you could still get your hands on and install
Thunderbird 3.1.15, but I may be wrong about that.

It's been a while since I used Evolution, but I think you can customize
the interface to just get the information you want. For example, you can
hide the calendar, tasks, contacts and so on. Furthermore, you can even
hide the panel that let's you select these different views, forcing you
to go to the menus to access them, which I think is what you want.

On 18/11/11 16:28, Jude DaShiell wrote:

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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The manual is at
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Jude<jdashiel-at-shellworld-dot-net>
<http://www.shellworld.net/~jdashiel/nj.html>

_______________________________________________
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




_______________________________________________
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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