Re: [orca-list] Screenreader Accessibility Testers for Ubuntu

[Kyle <kyle free2 ml>]

In the words of J.G:
> I will intentionally mix, as we say in Slovenia, apples and pears,
> when I'm going to say, look on accessibility in Windows or MAC.


OK let us do just this for a moment. I recently had the misfortune of 
having to try to help just getting a Microsoft beast set up and somewhat 
usable. This was running Windows 10. The in-built Narrator is utter 
crap, not allowing much in the way of website control at all, or at 
least I couldn't find how to get to specific controls in the same way I 
have done using Orca for years. Just getting through the setup process 
itself was a nightmare. Whereas I can get most Linux systems up and 
running in less than 20 minutes from scratch using Orca, Narrator, which 
is the only screen reader available during setup, gave my wife and me 
nothing but headaches, even though due to privacy and security concerns, 
we told it we had no internet access in order to bypass some of the 
worst parts. They even made it impossible to remove their browser in 
favor of Brave or Firefox, so I had to download both NVDA and Brave onto 
another computer and install them from a thumb drive just to get a level 
of access that was almost to the level I get with Orca. And then it 
still gave me problems, telling me when I closed a window that I was on 
something "unknown" that didn't appear to have any content of any kind, 
and then what passes for a start menu these days is also pretty much 
incomprehensible.


So now let me relate what I've heard of Mac computers. Just something as 
simple as Firefox, which I use every day, does not work with their 
Voiceover screen reader, and on the Mac, you have no other choice of 
screen readers, so if something doesn't work with Voiceover, it simply 
doesn't work at all. I'm not able to prove any of this for myself, but 
this is stuff I've heard from current users. I hear that even 
LibreOffice doesn't work as it should. We think we have issues here on 
Linux with Orca, well, yes we do, but they have it worse over in the 
land of the apple core, because many things that we use every day have 
worse issues or don't work at all.


So I guess in the end, it all comes down to what we know. Others have 
different experiences, but I find things on most Linux machines to be 
highly accessible out of the box, whereas I just can't use things in 
other places as effectively. If we want to mix apples and pears as 
stated above, I would say that the gold standard now is probably the 
Android operating system, or I specifically use a largely deGoogled 
LineageOS, with the Talkback screen reader. Believe it or not, 
accessibility there seems to be ahead of just about anything I've tried 
in the past 10 years, and I would say it's even somewhat ahead of 
Linux/Orca, since it can work so well on touch screens, complete with 
contracted braille on-screen keyboard input. Sure I do miss things like 
my workspaces and very easy app switching, but overall, the big names on 
the PC have a long way to go to catch up, and even Linux could do with 
some imitation of Android's touch screen accessibility, which is where 
at-spi could definitely use some improvement.

~Kyle