Re: [libreoffice-accessibility] Laws and standards

From: "Christophe Strobbe" <christophe.strobbe@esat.kuleuven.be>
> Hi Alex,
>
> At 02:25 7/12/2010, Alex Midence wrote:
> > Well, my thinking is and always will be that Libre Office is better
> > off making itself accessible no matter what screen reader is used.
>
>
> That is why LibreOffice (like OpenOffice.org) needs to support 
> accessibility APIs, keyboard access, desktop themes, etcetera. For a 
> screen reader to work with an application, the application needs to 
> implement the accessibility API (for example the Java Accessibility 
> API, which is not tied to a specific operating system), and the 
> screen reader needs to support that API. As far as I know, screen 
> readers on Windows have generally weak support for the Java Accessibility API.


True, although the screen readers for Windows have a weak support for SWING API. The support for 
SWT is much better.

But the screen readers for Windows have a non-existent support for other GUIs like Tk, GTK, QT...


> (Note: Java accessibility on Windows requires the Java Access Bridge. 
> Oracle is working on a new version of this bridge that will be part 
> of the Java Runtime Environment instead of a separate download.)

This will be great, but hopefully the screen readers manufacturers will also offer a better support 
for SWING.

JAWS for Windows offer some support for Java Access Bridge as it is now, but only in a virtual 
buffer, so the apps are seen like web pages.

SWING is slower than SWT anyway, and that weak support offered by JAWS makes the apps much less 
responsive, but what's the most important for blind programmers is that it is very hard if 
impossible to make the design of the GUI, because in the SWING apps, JAWS doesn't offer that "JAWS 
cursor" for allowing us to "see" the position of each window control on the screen.

I heard that Window Eyes started to offer a better support for SWING than JAWS but I haven't tested 
it.

By the way, what interface is LibreOffice using? I've tested OpenOffice and it was pretty 
accessible although I don't remember if I had Java Access Bridge installed. Does it use something 
else than SWING?

Thanks.

Octavian


-- 
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