Re: [orca-list] The LibreOffice's low accessibility

[Jean-Philippe MENGUAL <jpmengual hypra fr>]

Hi,
Le 14/01/2022 à 20:11, Vsevolod Popov via orca-list a écrit :
> Hello everyone.
> Recently, Jean-Philippe Mengual mentioned that LibreOffice has low 
> accessibility.
> Could you please explain what software from it's collection has 
> accessibility issues and what are they?

To sum up, I would say that the graphical interfae is globally 
accessible, even if things could be improved in programs such as Impress 
and Calc. However some features are now difficult to use, LO experiences 
some crashes due probably to its interaction with accessibility layer, 
and some advanced features are not quite accessible. Finally, and 
probably the most difficult, in the documents in Writer, while you have 
an access to text, head and fotpage, you don't have an easy access to 
footnote except via the flat review. Access to comments is terrible. 
Access to the collaborative marks is hard. Access to the objects such as 
images or insertion of objects is not there. Accessibility in a complex 
document with frames and sections is difficult too. But tables work 
fine. Spell checking works more or less, even if the mispelling is only 
announced if you have the caret on the mispelled word. The dialog has 
improved but still improvements to be done.


> The reason why I am asking is that I want to switch as completely as 
> possible from Windows to Linux and use LibreOffice Writer for working 
> with documents.

You can, I do everyday.

> Are these things like formatting the documents with styles accessible 
> like we do in MS Word?

Styles is the most frustrating feature I know in LO. Because it has been 
accessible until 4.2 and experienced a big regression since then. Today, 
for basic styles title 1 to 3, a submenu in Format makes this possible. 
But to tweak styles in details, I consider it is a pain. The dialog to 
handle numbering of chaptiers is hard too. The same for the Charachters 
dialog.

The problem comes if you havae advanced needs. However, flat review and 
some experience enables you to workaround many accessibility problems, 
but it is not always straightford.

> Creating contents, headings all that things with documents?

It is easy until level 3, but after it, it requires a lot of additional 
things to do

Regards

> What accessibility issues can be found?
> Thank you for any help.
> --
> regards,
> Vsevolod
> https://github.com/sevapopov2/
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