Re: [orca-list] VoiceOver vs. Orca - An ignorant question

[Jeffery Mewtamer <mewtamer gmail com>]

I've never used Voiceover... hell, I've never owned an Apple product
and the last time I made significant use of a Mac was back in the
mid-90s in a school computer lab that had a mix of Macs, DOS, Apple
IIe, and a single Win 3.1 machine, but personally, Orca is the
standard by which I judge all other graphical screen readers... and
from the time I spent in a vocational rehab program a few years ago,
lock me in a Firefox window and I'm not sure I could tell Orca, NVDA,
and JAWS apart.

That said, Voiceover versus Orca is like most OSX versus Linux
comparisons: Apple controls everything, so as long as you're okay with
the Apple way of doing things, everything fits together perfectly.
Linux lets you do just about anything, everything is modular, no one
controls anything, and as a result, some bits don't fit together very
well and you sometimes end up with a system that feels like a house of
cards if you venture too far from a bog standard install of a
mainstream distribution.

And I'll admit, sometimes Orca just cuts out and nothing I do makes it
respond... though usually, Firefox becomes unresponsive at the same
time, so I don't know if the problem is with Orca, Firefox, or a
component of my stripped down xserver)... When that happens, I just
switch to a different tty, run

killall orca firefox-esr

to end the hung graphical session, switch back to tty1 to launch a new
graphical session, and in the majority of cases, get back all of my
firefox tabs.

Granted, I'm also running a very stripped down x-server, Firefox is
the only graphical application I use, and Firefox and/or Orca hanging
doesn't affect the console screen reader I use on all the ttys not
running X. I imagine speech dropping in the GUI would be much more
annoying if I didn't have a talking console to fall back on.

Also, Apple is one of the biggest corporations in the world with clout
to affect policy. They could lose a lawsuit, be hit with record
breaking fines, and probably not even feel it. Plus, they're guilty of
numerous anti-consumer practices that I suspect have pissed off more
people than make up the entire user base of Voiceover, yet none of the
scandel and outrage ever manages to leave a mark on their uber shiny
exterior. I don't know what made Apple decide accessibility is worth
caring about, but I doubt it was the fear of being sued... and
besides, there are plenty of companies small enough that a lawsuit is
an existential threat that not only don't care about accessibility,
but are hostile to accessibility-related inquires.