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



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




_______________________________________________
orca-list mailing list
orca-list gnome org
https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/orca-list
Orca wiki: https://wiki.gnome.org/Projects/Orca
Orca documentation: https://help.gnome.org/users/orca/stable/
GNOME Universal Access guide: https://help.gnome.org/users/gnome-help/stable/a11y.html


--
###
John G. Heim, 608-263-4189, jheim math wisc edu


[Date Prev][Date Next]   [Thread Prev][Thread Next]   [Thread Index] [Date Index] [Author Index]