Re: [orca-list] Software Suggestions

["B. Henry" <burt1iband gmail com>]

There are many accessible applications. 
Look for interfaces that use GTK2 or 3. Webkit and many qt applications are also accessible. 
Thunderbird is excellent, but as with firefox when you have a realase that works fine for you keep a backup 
copy for it as well as the gnome support 
package for it and any language packs, etc as once in a while a version comes out with some major 
accessibility bugs. I'm currently using thunderbird 35 
something or another, one of the last tb35 nightly builds. 
I started using TB nightly builds because of a major accessibility bug in the stable release. I am not sure 
whether the bug has been fixed in 31 stable 
latest build or not. It should certainly be fixed in the alpha and likely beta releases. I think it was 33 
when I first found orca accurately reporting 
the same message in the message lists as was actually in focus.
For media players there are many accessible options. 
There is a GUI interface to mplayer that is pretty nice and is fine from an accessibility stand point. Totem, 
called videos in Ubuntu and other releases 
is accessible, but I do not like the current interface myself, and as with so much of gnome and gnome apps 
functrionality has been sacreficed to conform 
to an asthetic. I still keep it around as for simple playback it's still fine. Up and down arrows control 
volume, and you can advance and go back 
through a track with left and right arrows. 
If I had to pick one media player however it'd be VLC. 
Pidgin is the best GUI chat/IM client by far in my opinion both for its good accessibility and flexibility. 
There are many plug-ins for pidgin, quite a 
few come by default. If not already on the image you installed you can install the pidgin-plugin-pack for 
Ubuntu which has quite a few other popular 
plug-ins. 
It does not work for twitter. Get corebird for a GUI twitter client, but it's not near;ly as flexible as the 
commandline twitter app ttytter.
Skype is accessible, but requires the installation of the 32bit qt-at-spi package for 64 bit systems along 
with the normal qt-at-spi for that 
archetecture. 
For SIP VOIP linphone is very good. 
Most people use firefox, and as of august I think it was orca now works very well with it. Make sure to 
upgrade to orca 3.14 or a development build to 
get the good firefox support.  I also recommend installing google-chrome or perhaps chromium with the 
chromvox extension. They do not read webpages with 
orca, but chromevox now works very well and can get at some content where firefox and orca have trouble, e.g. 
I need to use chrome to push a couple of 
buttons on a banking site. 
Mangler is a good ventrilo client, mumble is another voice chat option that is open-source and in Ubuntu 
repos, and you can download the teamtalk 
package from their website for more voice chat. 
--
B.H.
 


On Sun, Nov 30, 2014 at 08:24:04PM -0600, Edgar Lozano wrote:
> Hi Everyone,
>
> I've been reading quite a bit of documentation about using Gnome, and
> yesterday, I decided to take the plunge into a relatively simple Linux
> distribution, Ubuntu. I had an old Laptop that I wasn't using, and
> decided that it would be perfect as a dedicated Linux machine. In the
> past, I've done remote Linux administration, and even programmed some
> utilities to run on Debian and Arch systems. anyway, I've never really
> been exposed to desktop environments, and was wondering what software
> you guys would recommend I use for e-mail, music playback, web
> browsers, chatting clients, etc. Obviously, I would like it if they
> were accessible with ORCA. I would appreciate any feedback.
>
> Thank you.
>
> -- 
> Thanks for reading.
> Have a good day.
> If you ever get the chance, go to http://www.realrandomradio.com and
> check us out.
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> 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
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