Re: [orca-list] Trying Quantal Quetsal Alpha 3

[Alex Midence <alex midence gmail com>]

If those applications are open source, I am not surprised.  There is a lot
of accessibility work to be done for open source applications in windows
right now.  Open Office needs work as does Libre Office and just about
anything using the gtk+ toolkit as well.  Where closed source applications
come into play and, furthermore, where applications targeted at the general
pc user are concerned things are diferent.  Here are some examples for you.
I would ask that we leave emotion out of this, please.  I am simply stating
the facts as I see them.  I am extremely fond of Linux and few things would
please me more than to have it be the most accessible OS on the planet.
This is simply not the case right now though.  Here we go:

This is long, btw so be prepared to speed your speech synth to get through
it.


Professional Musical production:  applications like Sound Forge, Cake Walk
and others are quite accessible in Windows and are in use by professional
blind musicians right now.  Linux has Ardour and Rosegarden which, as far as
I know are not being used by any blind musicians at this time.  I think you
have to use text-based tools for music in Linux some of which are quite
venerable.  Nothing wrong with text-based.  I'm talking GUI accessibility
though so they don't count.

Integrated Development Environments:  In windows, we find Visual Studio,
code::blocks, devC++, Sodbeans, Dreamweaver, Idle, and, of course, Eclipse
all of which are accessible.

In linux, there is a profusion of text editors and such to choose from and,
of course Emacs but the only truly accessible IDE I have been able to find
is Eclipse.  Thank goodness it is so versatile.  Geanny, Code::blocks,
Codelite, Anjuta, KDevelop, Idle, Gambas and Eric are Ide's I've looked at
and none of them are accessible.  In fact, Gedit is about the only truly
versatile text editor you can use in the GUI.  You have to go to cli for
other stuff like Nano, Vim, Joe and Emacs.  If you try to run Emacs in gui,
you are in for some trouble.  Gvim, the gui version of Vim is not
accessible.  So much for all the choices.  What good are choices if you
can't use but one?

Music Players:  This is pretty even.  
Windows has winamp, Windows Media Player, VLC Media Player, Realplayer, and
iTunes  al of which are completely accessible.  

Linux has a bunch but up until all the wonderful work with qt-at-spi, if you
wanted to use it in gui, you used gnome mplayer, rhythmbox and Banshee for
the most part.  

Browsers:  
In windows, you have Internet Explorer, Firefox, Seamonkey, Safari, Google
Chrome and Opera.  I've never tried Opera but I've tried all the others and
the only one I couldn't use was Safari.  Navigating web applications is very
quick and very very efficient with IE and Firefox since every single element
has a hotkey for jumping by them and every single one can have a list of its
kind generated with type ahead capability.  This is extremely useful in
pages on sites with hundreds of links and multiple headings where being able
to generate a links list, for instance and type the name of the one you want
gets you there in about a 3rd the time it would take you to do it linearly
or through a search where there is always the possibility of a misspell.  

Linux has Firefox, Seamonkey, Konkeror Rekonk, Epiphany, Chrome/chromium,
Opera, Galon, and many many more.  Firefox and Seamonkey are sort of head
and shoulders above their nearest competitor Epiphany for accessibility and
usability.  And, since you have to navigate the page quite linearly, you are
not as efficient at moving through a webpage as you are in Windows.  When I
am in a hurry and I am on my Linux box and I have to navigate a page, I fire
up Emacspeak and use w3 or w3m with isearch along with a bit of praying that
the site I want isn't going to have javascript.  That's not in the Gui.

E-mail:  All you have to do to see if I'm right on this one is search the
archives of this mailing list for all the questions as to which e-mail
client is best in the gui.  

Windows has Outlook, Lotus Notes, Eudora, Thunderbird and Seamonkey, (it
does mail too) to name but a few.  All of them are accessible.  In the case
of Thunderbird, I have never experienced the freezing or the mistaken
deletions and all other such problems I've had in Linux with it when I use
it in Windows.  

Linux has thunderbird, Sylpheed, clausemail, Evolution, and Kmail to keep
the list small and of these only Thunderbird is truly usable for production
right now in spite of the fact that it doesn't really have much integration
in any of the major desktop environments.

Office Productivity:  Last category
Windows has MS Office, Corel Office, Symphony, Open and LibreOffice and
others which I've probably never heard of.  All of these are accessible
except for Open and Libreoffice which are partially so.  Windows also has
Adobe's applications for reading PDF documents and they are about as
accessible as webpages in many instances.  This is even the case with
interactive pdf where you fill out forms and such.

Linux has Open and Libreoffice, Gnome office (abiword, gnumeric and
company), KOffice and I'm sure there are more.  Of these, though only
open/libreoffice is accessible.  For pdf's you have to go through an amazing
bit of hard work in Linux to get them accessible using conversion utilities
and the like.  It is not possible to use Evince, Adobe reader, xpdf, or any
of those applications except, perhaps for gpdf which, as I recall, still
falls below the mark on delivering you the pdf document accessibly.  You
have to turn to utilities like pdf2html or pdf2txt in the cli to get at the
text in the pdf document and you can forget about interactive pdf's
altogether.  

If you've made it this far, I thank you for your attention.  I'm sorry but
the claim that Windows accessibility is somehow behind that of Linux is
simply not true.  And, my claim still stands.  Less gui choices and
something more centralized in Linux would be really good for accessibility.
Look at all the fine work that's been done in Gnome.  A good deal of
concentrated effort on one desktop has produced lots of accessibility.  The
job of making all those different environments accessible is too big, it
seems.  We'll hopefully get all the major ones soon like  KDE and XFCE and
LXDE but I don't think we'll ever be able to use stuff like Fluxbox, Icewm,
Fvwm or CDE.  

Alex M


-----Original Message-----
From: orca-list-bounces gnome org [mailto:orca-list-bounces gnome org] On
Behalf Of Kyle
Sent: Wednesday, August 01, 2012 2:41 PM
To: orca-list gnome org
Subject: Re: [orca-list] Trying Quantal Quetsal Alpha 3



According to "Andy B."c
#Is this an opinion, or have you done extensive research on the matter?
#Can
#you explain your claim that at least 50% of Windows is inaccessible?

This is my experience based on the fact that more than half the applications
I have tried for Windows just don't work well with any screen reader. My
tale of woe regarding trying to find simple partitioning software was
further proof that there has been very little change in the last 10 years,
even though we do now have NVDA for the times we find ourselves trying to
use a Windows machine.
~Kyle
--
Kyle is a droid.
The whole world knows it
This e-mail shows it.
_______________________________________________
orca-list mailing list
orca-list gnome org
https://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