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

["John G. Heim" <jheim math wisc edu>]

Man, as a guy who uses both VoiceOver and Orca all the time every day, I 
sure don't think Voiceover works that much better than Orca. For one 
thing, Linux/Orca will run on hardware that MacOS/VoiceOver totally 
choke on. Years ago, my employer gave me a Macbook Pro. Over the years, 
each operating system upgrade made it run slower and slowr until 
eventually it was intolerable. Finally, my employer gave me a new 
Macbook Pro for doing Zoom calls. But then I put Linux on the old 
Macbook and you know what? Over the last few months, i have gradually 
stopped using the new Macbook. I didn't even conciously do it but I just 
prefer the old laptop with Linux and Orca to the new laptop with MacOS 
and VoiceOver.

I think what you mean is that Orca has way more glitches than VoiceOver. 
Orca seems to have a lot of weird, small problems. And I might grant 
that Orca hangs more often than VoiceOver. But Orca is way easier to use 
than Voiceover. I even think that Thunderbird is superior to Mac Mail 
and Firefox is superior to Safari. The designers for Mac Mail and Safari 
assume everyone has a mouse. Sure, you usually can do stuff with the 
keyboard but it's designed first for mouse users. Thunderbird and 
Firefox were designed much more equally for oltime keyboard users. 
That's who Linux users are, in large part. In MacOS, everything takes 
too many key strokes.  Plus, in MacOS, there are places where you press 
tab and then shift tab and you do **not* end up back where you were. 
IMO, that should never happen.

Orca never actually crashes for me. Pretty regularly, a few times every 
day, it hangs. If you wait long enough, it comes back. Admittedly this 
is a huge problem. I press alt+F2 and then type "orca --replace" several 
times every day. But I just prefer that to the constant inconvenience of 
VoiceOver. I mean, i'd rather be really annoyed 2 or 3 times a day than 
constantly annoyed a little bit all day.

On 12/22/21 05:29, Reece O'Bryan via orca-list wrote:
> I tried to think of the nicest way to ask this without offending anyone 
> on this list, but I can’t think of a way to ask my questions without 
> either being unclear or slightly offensive, so here goes...
>
> Why is it that VoiceOver seems to work so much better than orca? I ask 
> from a position of pure ignorance… is it as simple as Apple having $1 T 
> and not wanting an ADA lawsuit while Orca is a free project done by 
> amazing volunteers? Is VoiceOver somehow integrated into Mac OS and Orca 
> is working with further distance from the Linux kernel?
>
> My biggest problem with orca is that I somehow repeatedly make my system 
> kill speech by doing very small things. If this happened with Mac OS and 
> voiceover, then I can simply tell Siri to turn voiceover off and back 
> on. With orca it seems as if when you kill speech, then you literally 
> have killed it and it takes dramatic steps such as a restore or 
> reinstall  to fix it. Wouldn’t it be easier to have a secondary, 
> potentially even optional, process running in the background that only 
> checks to see that speech is working with Orca and Wood restart Orca if 
> it crashes?
>
> Maybe this is incorrect thinking. Is the problem that orca is running at 
> or like software on the operating system instead of being a part of it 
> like with macOS? Meaning an OS process should perform the check and fix 
> of speech.
>
> Thank you,
>
> -Reece O’Bryan
> C: (502)-827-3724
> 1645 Parkway, Sevierville, TN 37862
>
>
>
>
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--
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John G. Heim, 608-263-4189, jheim math wisc edu