On Wed, 26 Oct 2005 14:34:20 +0100, Dan Kegel <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
These three issues need to be dealt with promptly, e.g. before Massachusetts holds hearings on the switch to OpenDocument. Has anyone on this list tested screen readers like JAWS with OpenOffice 2.0?
OK. I just spent five minutes playing with the Jaws 7.0 demo on a system running windows 2k with 1GB of memory. Resource usage was not an issue,so far as I could tell -- but t would have been catastrophic if it was. On the other hand, Jaws and OOo 2.0 do not work well together. The big and immediately obvious problems were
dialogue boxes -- not recognised by Jaws. It would navigate within them if I could see what I was doing but that rather defeats the point. There was no way to get it to read out all the choices
wizard dialogue boxes, with panes and different sheeets, completely defeated it.
Menus sort of worked. But for about half the entries with icons it would read out a meaningless entry before the choice itself, like "Graphic 794 Fax". This seemed to happen at the top of a menu, before the first separator, but not after. Some menu entires with icons were read out as they should be.
Reading text from the screen -- this seemed to jump about in a bewildering fashion. I could never tell where it was going to start, and whether it would skip whole paragraphs. That may have been becaseu I am an inexperienced, and sighted, operator. But it wasn't good.
So I think we have a real and serious problem here, unless there are other screenreader programs which work better with OOo.
If I were blind I would refuse to use OOo with Jaws or to consider the combination usable.
-- Andrew Brown What I do: www.darwinwars.com What I'm up to: www.thewormbook.com/helmintholog/ --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
