Re: [orca-list] Accessibility of Open/Libre Office VS MS Office (was Government payed assistive technologies)



Hi,
There is a setting in Orca's preferences, in the Speech tab, which
determins wether Orca will read the whole row, or just the current cell.
You could bring the Calc specific preferences and set it there, if you
want it to be default for this application. You could also set it on the
fly with Orca+F11.

If the world population is 7.1 billion and 39 milion of us are blind,
this makes us 0.0055% of all people. accessibility is just with lower
preority, or to be exact 181 times lower. Or in other words, they are
more likely to fix a vissual glitch, rather than a missing lable, which
is used for accessibility.
Since Open/Libre Office has 10% market share, it is understandable they
concentrate to the needs of the largest group of potential users. But
don't think it's not the same in Microsoft - every new version of MS
Office brings countless accessibility bugs, like it's not even tested.
Some of them they fix, some of them have workarounds in the screen
reader itself, some are never fixed or are fixed in the next major
version, which introduces new one etc. Windows 10 is also super buggy
and slower in terms of accessibility, compaired to the privious 4
versions. And Windows developers are 1000 times more than Linux once, so
it's understandable that the progress is even slower, but it's a 100
times faster than what the numbers would suggest, cause of the much more
efective development model.

Best wishes,
Zahari

На  4.09.2015 в 12:21, Vincenzo Rubano написа:
Hi all,

I’m sorry, but i do not consider LibreOffice a serious piece of software. If a software has accessibility 
bugs sitting there for years without anyone caring to fix them, how can you consider it serious? And I 
don’t want to talk about the whole Document Foundation forking process: forks are one of the things that I 
do not like about open source software, they often are only a waste of resources.

Kendell, how do you fix Orca/Libreoffice so that in calc does not read the entire row? Because that’s not a 
so minor issue… It's a critical one for me!

BTW, LibreOffice accessibility is far, far behind MSOffice accessibility even on the linux platform. And 
this is not an opinion, it’s a fact: just take a look at LibreOffice accessibility bugs in their issue 
queue. I even tried to start reporting LO bugs for the mac platform, but after a certain point I stopped: 
what’s the point in investing my time on something that won’t be fixed for years?

Vincenzo.


Il giorno 04 set 2015, alle ore 10:39, Zahari Yurukov <zahari yurukov gmail com> ha scritto:

Hi,
reading is one thing (and is mostly accessible), but the composing of
documents is the bigger problem. I rarely have to use those programs
myself and never do a complex formatting, but most of the complaints
that I hear are from that direction.
It feels like the Open/Libre office developers are not very serious
regarding accessibility. And delaying it don't make things easier.
You're right though, that under Linux it's much better compaired to Windows.

But make no mistake - Open/Libre Office is one of the greatest successes
of the open source community and most of the complaints of the sighted
people are total BS.

Best wishes,
Zahari

На  4.09.2015 в 03:34, kendell clark написа:
hi
Zahari has a point. Ms does in fact, or used to at any rate, make
different pieces of software, works for example, that cannot use their
own format, instead using another format entirely. I don't find
libreoffice accessibility to be behind microsoft office, but I'm a
little bias, as I've not used ms office since ... oh, version 2003 I
think might have been the latest I used. On windows, libre office
accessibility is hit and miss, but on linux it usually works out of the
box, although I wish orca didn't default to reading an entire
spreadsheet row, causing orca to echo the entire line when you up and
down arrow. That's a nit though, and it's easily fixed. Reading entire
rows is usually incredibly useful, it's only in libreoffice calc that
it's not always useful, but the "soffice" binary is such that joanie
can't have different prefs for the different parts of libre office.
libre office is called soffice, whether you're running calc, writer,
impress, etc so there's no way for orca to tell
thanks
Kendell clark


On 09/03/2015 07:24 PM, Zahari Yurukov wrote:
Hi,
I ment entirely another thing: governments should pay for developing
free software (new or existing), instead of buying a proprietary one.      
They should not enforce one software over another. Currently, it's
exactly the opposite.
They should however enforce open standards - that's the only way for
preventing monopolies (see below).

Regarding Open/Libre Office, it's the accessibility which is behind that
in MS Office. From a sighted perspective, there is not much difference,
and is mostly a habit. It was the proprietary DOC format, which led to
this market share (there always have been other word-processors and
electronic tables), and I don't believe that it's adoption was a
coincidence, if you understand what I mean. The next MS format, which
was supposed to be open - DOCX", was discredeted by Microsoft, who with
their dominant market share constantly violate it, making other
word-processing applications unable to work with documents created in MS
Word. MS Office also intentionaly doesn't work well with open formats.

Fortunately, ODF is now an international standard, and MS "standards"
are slowly droped in favor of open formats, at least in the world
outside USA.

Sadly, in USA people like Bill Gates and Steve Jobs are presented as
heroes, though they're among the biggest villians the IT industry have
ever seen for it's short history. Such people are shame for humanity -
they sold every single humanbeing  on this planet for money and power.
And now Bill Gates is trying to represent himself as the good guy, a
philantropyst. What a joke.
Of course, if it wasn't for them, it probably would be someone else -
it's our job, the customers,  to throw them out of business.

Look Windows 10 - the biggest spyware ever created. Now hear this guy, 2
years ago:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=076Jplu1Abk&feature=youtu.be&t=5m44s
After Windows 10, the question Windows VS Linux is over for me for good.

And let's talk a litle bit about what is government, cause we've
mentioning it so often it this thread. It's an administrative entity,
elected by the people in order to serv those same people. It should
mediate between the different interests of the members of the society,
and should not take sides - it should be bound by the law.
In many countries, the government has it's own life and own interests,
which could not be called a democracy for sure. So it should be
reminded of it's purpose.

Know what, more sighted people should be interested where their money
go, when they give them for the blind or anything. Sadly, people pey for
the privilege to not care. That's why they often are exploited.

Sorry, but everything is politics in this world, from the early days the
societies were formed, and it's really complicated.

Best wishes,
Zahari

На  3.09.2015 в 23:59, Vincenzo Rubano написа:
Hi Krishnakant,,

in theory you’re right, but constraining a government to opensource IMO goes against the principle of 
granting digital freedom to the citizens. At least I would feel so if I were constrained to use 
libreoffice, just to give an example. I’d feel my freedom reduced because I would be constrained to use 
something buggy and that is not completely accessible when something better in terms of accessibility 
exists...

Also, I think that this discussion cannot be reduced just to the opensource vs proprietary software. 
From my POV there are many things to consider, support for the used application, its usage scenario 
just to mention two of them.

All this said, I am happy to use both proprietary and open source software, choosing whatever is more 
suitable for my needs.

Vincenzo.

Il giorno 03 set 2015, alle ore 21:15, kk <krmane gmail com> ha scritto:

It is the national security and digital freedom of her citisons which matter and must matter for 
government on priority.
And not even mentioning the amount of money that goes out from the country.
I am reminded of the old british rule in India.
Lot's of facilities but no freedom.
happy hacking.
Krishnakant,


On Friday 04 September 2015 12:20 AM, Vincenzo Rubano wrote:
This has been a strong debate recently at our university, among computer science students.

You wrote:
But government *must* never spend money on monopolistic and closed software which takes away our 
digital freedom.

Well, honestly in my opinion there are no absolute rules to follow. The right decision should be made 
on a case by case. For instance, if a government should choose between using nvda and using jaws as a 
windows screen reader, then obviously the choice is NVDA: it's free and open source and it has 
*almost any* feature that jaws has.
If the choice should be between libreoffice and MS Office, though, the situation is completely 
different. Ms Office is more stable, less buggy and even more accessible than Libreoffice.

IMO, the government should pick up whatever can make people most productive… And that’s not always 
open source software.

Vincenzo.
Il giorno 03 set 2015, alle ore 20:31, kk <krmane gmail com> ha scritto:

Any individual has the choice to use what they want.
But government *must* never spend money on monopolistic and closed software which takes away our 
digital freedom.
exclusive use of free software must be used to protect our freedom.
I too distrust the big proprietary houses, and there are strong reasons to do so.
Happy hacking.
Krishnakant.


On Thursday 03 September 2015 11:01 PM, Victor Lawrence wrote:
I tend to agree.  If the states and government agencies are so
financially strapped, they should save money by providing their
clients with Linux and Orca instead of the expensive screen readers.

I'm not totally against government assistance when it actually does
people some good.  But I believe in responsible government spending
and the free market.  I do not like government monopolies or business
monopolies.  I'm one of those conservatives who distrusts big
government and big business.

Recently I read a post from a blogger who claims that Google, Freedom
Scientific and other big companies are in bed with the American
Council Of The Blind and the National Federation Of The Blind.  In
short, the blogger claimed that these companies bribe these advocacy
groups to promote their products.  These companies show up at the
national conventions and pour lots of money into these organizations
to buy their loyalty when most blind people would really rather use
Apple products or something else.  According to the blogger, at least
Apple doesn't even bother to bribe the ACB or the NFB.

VictorOn 9/3/15, Zahari Yurukov <zahari yurukov gmail com> wrote:
Hi,
In my opinion, it's extremely distructive for the blind when a
government pays for proprietary software, and not less bad when a
government pays for extremely overpriced hardware.
Exactly this is what supports monopolies and keeps the prices high.
JAWS is absurdly overpriced - how many people have bought it for
themselfs, with their own money? It has no chance on the free market.
Of course FreedomScientific are happy with over 900% profit.
The governments, spending the taxpayer's money, should support the free
software, instead of making a few companies rediculously rich - the
same applies for Microsoft, too.
And the profits in the accessibility hardware are not much different in
percentage, except the prices are 5 times higher. No, I don't want a
$5000 or $10000 braille display, thank you very much.
They have returned their investments a million time, and the normal
logic would be to lower the price and saturate the market, but no - why,
if the governments provide them with a constant flow of money.
That aplies to every business on the accessibility market - why they
would start a price war, when they all lose at the end - they'll lose
their high profit margin. Now, those who lose are the customers, but who
cares for the customer? Yeah, they all care right, but this is nothing
more than a marketing BS.
And how exactly the customer loses? Firstly there are a very small
percent of those who need this technology who actually get it. For
screen readers that's not the case from 2006, thanks to Orca, NVDA and
VoiceOver, but it applies for anything else. And it can't be otherwise
with this prices.
Second, that prevents other companies for entering the market, which
again helps to the monopolists to keep the high prices, but not only
that - why would they improve their products, when there is no
competition? Yeah, there are many braille display vendors, but they have
their own teretories, where one or the other is a monopolist.

In my opinion, the people who work in the governments look us as an
unpleasant  liability, so they throw money (which are not theirs) over
such companies (and organizations), as far as the blind get off their
heads. They don't really care how those money are spend, as long as they
can tell the voters "This year, we gave X millions for the blind, yay!".
And the organizations don't care either - you'll teach me how to use
JAWS? No, better not. Actually, it's the organizations, who promote
those products, cause guess who is one of their other donors. And if we
could say that they recognize NVDA - it growed too much to be ignored by
anyone, I'm sure they don't recommend it to the blind people. And if
they recommend JAWS instead of NVDA, the chances they would recommend
Linux at all are negative. No, JAWS is not superior to NVDA, not for 99%
of the use cases, not in 2015, and for sure not regarding the price. For
those few cases which NVDA doesn't cope well, it's cheaper to find a
sighted help, instead of buying JAWS.

And if you have used Linux long enough, you would know that it is
superior to Windows in many more arias, compaired to those arias which
is the opposite. Unfortunately, accessibility is not one of those arias
for the most people, but it would not improve itself - it needs people,
who have a will and knolage to do it. And those people need money - they
won't work for free and you can't blame them - it's their right. In
contrast of proprietary software though, if you give money to a free
software developer, those money don't disappear - they transffer into
source code, which anyone could improve later. If you give money to
company, which develops a proprietary software, they could always close
doors (if they're not financialy satisfied, for example), and you end
with nothing.

So, use free software, promote free software, and pay for free software
- as much as you can. It's very sad we can't donate directly to the guys
and gals which develop the accessibility infrastructure under Linux -
that would motivate them enormously, and will also motivate others to
join and we'll not be the guys who always complain any more.

There are also many other ways you could help free software:
http://itsfoss.com/help-linux-grow/

And if you live in USA, please stand up against this:
http://tech.slashdot.org/story/15/09/02/1513259/new-fcc-rules-could-ban-wifi-router-firmware-modification

Best wishes,
Zahari

На  3.09.2015 в 18:28, John Heim написа:
Kyle,

You should apologize for using the term "blind government entitlement
babies". That's offensive.




On 09/02/2015 10:08 AM, Kyle wrote:
Sorry for the upcoming rant, but some of this nonsense I'm seeing drove
me to it.

I can still build an 8-core x86_64 computer for less money than it
currently costs to purchase even the least expensive open source
braille displays, which are still costly prototypes. Once braille
becomes as affordable as say for instance a computer monitor, then
maybe more people will have the means to code for them, and braille
won't be just for lucky blind government entitlement babies anymore.
Until then, braille is always going to be too expensive to get enough
people working on to improve it. Sorry, that's just the way it is. And
no, I didn't use braille back in the days when I had access to Windows
either, because I'm not a blind government baby who expected all the
expensive stuff to be handed to me like I'm entitled to it or
something, which is also why I use Linux now and help where I can to
raise awareness and to contribute where I can to its development and
wider usage by *all* people, not just entitlement blinks. No, Linux
isn't "catching up" as you Microsoft and Apple lovers so eloquently put
it. It's here, and it's far ahead of anything else you could be using.
So get used to it.
Sent from my Cancerian beast
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Log bugs and feature requests at http://bugzilla.gnome.org

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Log bugs and feature requests at http://bugzilla.gnome.org

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Log bugs and feature requests at http://bugzilla.gnome.org



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