You are very right. Octavian ----- Original Message ----- From: "Alex Midence" <alex.midence@gmail.com> To: <accessibility@libreoffice.org> Sent: Tuesday, December 07, 2010 3:25 AM Subject: Re: [libreoffice-accessibility] Laws and standards 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 standardsHi 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. -- E-mail to accessibility+help@libreoffice.org for instructions on how to unsubscribe List archives are available at http://www.libreoffice.org/lists/accessibility/ All messages you send to this list will be publicly archived and cannot be deleted-- E-mail to accessibility+help@libreoffice.org for instructions on how to unsubscribe List archives are available at http://www.libreoffice.org/lists/accessibility/ All messages you send to this list will be publicly archived and cannot be deleted
-- E-mail to accessibility+help@libreoffice.org for instructions on how to unsubscribe List archives are available at http://www.libreoffice.org/lists/accessibility/ All messages you send to this list will be publicly archived and cannot be deleted -- E-mail to accessibility+help@libreoffice.org for instructions on how to unsubscribe List archives are available at http://www.libreoffice.org/lists/accessibility/ All messages you send to this list will be publicly archived and cannot be deleted