Re: [libreoffice-accessibility] Laws and standards

Hi, Christophe,

Yes, I mean those very same agencies.  The agencies that assist with
employment and with funding for assistive technology.  In the matter
of fearing that it is a chancy thing to make these people aware of
things like NVDA because they might decide not to purchase software on
the grounds that free alternatives are available, I would have to say
that this is so very very true!  Honestly, this was a fear of mine for
a time.  This is why the people with whom I did discuss these
technologies were only a very few individuals.  All were themselves
blind and all were told that NVDA has many limitations.  They
downloaded it and found out for themselves.  They also found all the
very good things it does like outstanding support for Firefox, partial
support for Open Office and propper handling of Scintilla-based
editors.  On the matter of language switching, Jaws has excelent
support for this, as you say.  The speech synthesizer provided with
it(the software that makes it talk) is quite good and multilingual.
English (UK and American), Spanish, (Euro and Latin american), French
(Canadian and that of France), German, Finnish, Italian, and Brazilian
Portuguese are all well supported.  NVDA uses Espeak as its primary
synthesizer.  This synth is open source and does ok in English.  I was
not impressed with how it sounded in other languages.   This is
important to me because I speak other languages besides English and I
like to access information in them from time to time.  Espeak is
difficult for me to understand in French, German and Spanish.  And,
you are correct, it does not switch automatically.  With Jaws, I can
visit a website for a company based in Madrid, the official site of a
city in Germany, and a travel site for visiting Paris.  In all cases,
Jaws will automatically switch to the language indicated in the html
tags found in the head of the document.  It will even switch dialects
such as going from UK English to American or, in the case of the sapi
5 voices, American to Australian or Indian English.  Its nice features
notwithstanding, I do think NVDA will eventually surpass Jaws in
functionality most especially when NVDA is set up such that every
application loads it's own configuration file and speech settings.
This is because NVDA uses Python as a scripting language and for much
of its core code whereass Jaws uses a proprietary scripting language
unique to itself which is not as easy to learn as Python and, by
definition is not as widely known as Python.  That is still some time
away though.  Also, NVDA is translated into many more languages than
Jaws so, once Espeak's pronunciation gets cleaned up, and scripts are
written to load the different languages when certain conditions are
met, it'll beat Jaws on that score too.

Alex M


On 12/6/10, Christophe Strobbe <christophe.strobbe@esat.kuleuven.be> wrote:
> Hi Alex,
>
> At 18:53 6/12/2010, Alex Midence wrote:
> > (...)  I use Jaws and NVDA as my screen readers in
> > windows and Orca in Linux.
>
> It is good to hear that there are screen reader users on this list!
>
>
> > (...)  I am relieved to see mention of
> > closed source, non-free screen readers in this thread.  Believe it or
> > not, very few people in government agencies (at least the ones here in
> > Texas) with whom I have spoken have heard of NVDA. (...)
>
> Do you mean agencies that refund (in whole or in part) assistive
> technologies? It is true that these agencies are not always aware of
> free and open-source alternatives. This is also the case in Belgium,
> where I live.
> Informing these agencies about free and open-source assistive
> technologies is not without risk, unfortunately: they might just say,
> for example: "Now that free screen readers are available for Windows,
> we will stop refunding JAWS, Window-Eyes, Hal, Supernova, etctera",
> without checking if the free alternatives are good enough to replace
> the commercial ones.
> (I heard this from someone who provides technical advice to such an
> agency in Belgium.)
> For example, JAWS and Window-Eyes support language switching inside a
> document; free alternatives do not necessarily support this and
> require the user to switch the TTS language manually.
>
> Best regards,
>
> Christophe
>
>
> --
> Christophe Strobbe
> K.U.Leuven - Dept. of Electrical Engineering - SCD
> Research Group on Document Architectures
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> B-3001 Leuven-Heverlee
> BELGIUM
> tel: +32 16 32 85 51
> http://www.docarch.be/
> Twitter: @RabelaisA11y
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