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

[John Covici <covici ccs covici com>]

Just to let you know, I find windows and Jaws (which you do have to
pay for at $90 or so /year) to actually be better than Orca for a lot
of things, and if people have written wscripts of which there are a
lot of or sometimes the manufacturer of Jaws has scripts, its quite
accessible.  For some reason I did not find the Windows set up not so
bad.  Believe me, I am not a fan of Windows, but the screen reader
(Jaws) has been around for 20 years and so does have a lot of good
stuff -- along with lots of bugs.

I also have a Mac and once you get used to it, Voiceover is not too
bad, it does work with Google Chrome and Safari which is the normal
browser on the Mac.  I don't think its as good because there is no way
to write scripts to make apps work, either they were written to
Apple's standards in which case they work great, or if they are not
written to standards, they may not work at all or just barely.

Htere is also a free sdcreen reader for windows called nvda which is
not too bad, but it does not get the love of Jaws -- its maintained by
volunteers.

This is my take, so take it as such.

On Wed, 06 Apr 2022 18:54:14 -0400,
Kyle via orca-list wrote:
> 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
>
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> 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

-- 
Your life is like a penny.  You're going to lose it.  The question is:
How do
you spend it?

         John Covici wb2una
         covici ccs covici com