Re: [orca-list] LibreOffice and orca: moving to headings, links, tables etc.

[Nimer Jaber <nimerjaber1 gmail com>]

Windows screen readers are definitely not sluggish everywhere. I hate fanboyism or fangirlism no matter where they exist.

NVDA and JAWS are quite responsive in and out of web apps, work as expected in Docs, and are more responsive than Orca in certain situations.

There are a lot of reasons why many people never stick to using Linux. Linux accessibility is nowhere near what it is on Windows, neither is Linux reliability. Not in GUI land, anyway.

If you don't know how to use Windows screen readers, it's better to say that, or it's better to say that you prefer Orca over NVDA, but it isn't accurate to say that NVDA is sluggish, nor is it accurate to say that, simply because virtual buffers exist, that makes a Windows screen reader inferior on the web. There are many users who are quite efficient on the web, and JAWS has features that make the web incredibly efficient because it allows for sound schemes for *all* web elements, thus making redundant speech unnecessary. 

When in Docs and traversing through tables, there is nothing unresponsive about JAWS or NVDA. If you want your myths to be disproven, we can hop on a call of whatever app of your choosing, and I can demonstrate to you that Windows screen readers are far from unresponsive, and in many cases, much, much more productive than Orca.

On Wed, Apr 20, 2022 at 5:16 AM Kyle via orca-list <orca-list gnome org> wrote:

Devin Prater popped in and said:
> M biggest problem with Orca and Google Docs is that when one goes into
> a table in Google Docs, with screen reader and braille mode enabled,
> Orca is very sluggish. This doesn't happen with Windows screen readers.


That's because they're sluggish everywhere, especially on websites. ANd
I speak from experience, having just tried to use such a beast on a
simple banking website for testing purposes. I don't want to even think
about trying to use Google Docs or sheets with their virtual buffering
and such. And a website I use for work would be impacted even worse,
since it pops up something that I have to click regularly that generally
is always in the same place but comes and goes. It's a bit of an a11y
nightmare, but with Orca, at least it works more often than not. I can't
imagine what someone using NVDA for example would have to go through
with its copies of websites and such. As I recall, someone who tried
that was told they wouldn't need to click the item that pops up, but I
was made aware of the importance of the click ratio for that specific
item, so I'm very happy that I use Orca because it's what works and puts
money in the bank.


Yes, sluggishness is certainly an issue that needs to be addressed, but
saying it's sluggish here, but I don't see this problem over there on a
screen reader and operating system that the primary developer of Orca is
not using and does not have access to certainly doesn't help in trying
to get this issue resolved. I have said before and I will say again that
these are two different beasts; their internals are very different. The
bug is with Orca, at-spi or the browser's a11y implementation, possibly
even a combination of these things. I do know that Brave, which is a
Chromium-based browser, seems to work a bit better with Docs and Sheets,
but crashes on some sites, including the work site I mentioned. Firefox
on the other hand tends to be a bit more sluggish, at least when
presenting medium to large blocks of text, but it's mostly rock solid
here. These are the bugs that need to be addressed, and saying that
XYZOS doesn't have them won't help us here, especially when they use
very hacky work-arounds to get past these bugs that you may not see, but
that cannot be implemented here without causing worse problems.

~Kyle

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--

Best,

Nimer Jaber

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