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Well, my thinking is and always will be that Libre Office is better
off making itself accessible no matter what screen reader is used.
This way, all of the effort and all of the testing that is required to
get this job done right does not run the risk of being wasted on one
solution that may or may not be around for the foreseeable future.  it
is a sad truth that not all open source projects are as long lived as
Open Office and hopefully Libre Office is shaping up to be.  Take the
case of Firevox.  It was a very promising talking extension for
firefox that offered excelent support for live regions and math ml.
Unfortunately, no work appears to have been done on it since 2008.  It
will not work with current versions of Firefox.  It is sad to think of
how much work must have gone into such a program only to have it fall
by the wayside like that.  If Libre Office avoids this pitfall and
aims for optimizing accessibility on all assistive technologies,
including proprietary ones and open source alike, then the work we do
as members of this list will be long-lasting and do a lot of good for
a lot of people around the world.

Thanks.

Alex M

On 12/6/10, Octavian Rasnita <orasnita@gmail.com> wrote:
The same danger from the perspective of the blind computer users also appear
in other EU countries where the governments prefer paying for screen readers
made in EU, even though none of them are as good as JAWS.

The governments don't care that just a few computer users need to use
complex applications like Visual Studio, Eclipse or even a simple text
editor like TextPad which is absolutely inaccessible with NVDA (or at least
it was inaccessible a few months ago).

Octavian

----- Original Message -----
From: "Christophe Strobbe" <christophe.strobbe@esat.kuleuven.be>
To: <accessibility@libreoffice.org>
Sent: Monday, December 06, 2010 8:59 PM
Subject: Re: [libreoffice-accessibility] Laws and standards


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
Kasteelpark Arenberg 10 bus 2442
B-3001 Leuven-Heverlee
BELGIUM
tel: +32 16 32 85 51
http://www.docarch.be/
Twitter: @RabelaisA11y
---
"Better products and services through end-user empowerment"
www.usem-net.eu - www.stand4all.eu
---
Please don't invite me to Facebook, Quechup or other "social
networks". You may have agreed to their "privacy policy", but I haven't.


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