Why not put a reader in the program? It would help solve the
accessiblility issue and open the program up to people who are visually impaired
and solve the problem.
I've heard rumors that MicroSoft is considering that in their Vista.
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Saturday, February 25, 2006 7:18
AM
Subject: [ui-dev] JAWS 7.0 and OpenOffice
2.0
Good morning,
I have posted this bug with OpenOffice's
accessibility in the past and was refered (as a suggestion) to Freedom
Scientific, the developer of the JAWS screen reader. I spoke with them,
they were of little help, referring me to Sun. Since then I have been
doing some thinking and believe that what I am going to describe below is not
a JAWS problem. I do not know if the problem lies in the OpenOffice
code, or in the JAVA Accessibility API.
When I have a document open in OpenOffice Writer,
and I use the u/d arrow keys to move from line to line, lines after a hard
return are only spoke if visited a second time. This is a little hard to
explain, perhaps an example
Example:
Dear sir,
This is my letter to you as an example, Hopefully
this line is long enough to wrap to the next line so that it works as an
example. If not, hopefully everyone can use their imaginiation.
Goodbye.
Sincerely,
xxx
In the above example, if I were starting at the
top of the document "Dear" and using the down arrow to read by line, the first
line of the message body "This my letter..." would only be read if I went down
to the second line in the paragraph and then pressed the up arrow to go back
to the first line. This is a little annoying but I can work around it
with paragraphs. However, the same would hold true for the "Sincerely"
line. However, in this case, there is not second line in the
paragraph to move back up from, therefor, JAWS will not read the text at
all. That is, if a paragraph of text fits nicely onto one line I can not
read it once it is written. What I hear instead of the text I am
expecting is "blank". Pretty much making OpenOffice Writer useless to a
blind user of JAWS.
Now, like I said, I am not sure where the problem
lies, but expect it is somewhere in the OpenOffice code or the Java
Accessibility API, though, I do not rule out Freedom Scientific. This is
a pretty major issue, as there is really no reason to incorporate the JAVA
access technology if if the application remains, for all intents and purposes,
unusable.
I don't mean to complain about the product, only
to emphasize what really needs to be addressed to make it truely
accessible.
Thank you for your continued
assistance,
Everett
