I think it is rather rediculous that mozilla says we want it to be
entirely accessable across all platforms, but it's our way or no way.
On 15-Nov-08, at 12:44 AM, Jacob Schmude wrote:
I can't speak to the motives of Mozilla, but it certainly does seem
counterproductive to take the stance they are taking. As for Orca
and Firefox, it is useable though far from a joy to use. It takes an
approach very similar to NVDA on Windows, but has serious stability
issues and often gets into a loop on pages--i.e. you'll be arrowing
through the same text repeatedly due to Orca getting stuck. It also
has a tendency to repeat an entire page after each element loads, so
very complex sites often continuously start reading from the top
until they are loaded--this often causes an exception in Orca and
makes it crash--admittedly, Orca is not a shining example of
stability. Further, responsiveness can be a serious problem
depending on a number of factors in your UNIX or Gnome setup,
sometimes Orca can take up to a second--no, I'm not exagerating--to
read after you push the arrow keys.
That being said, if you really did have to use it you would be able
to do most things with it. But it can be a world of frustration
especially if you need to do something quickly or are trying to get
through a conplex site you've never visited. Give me Safari, even
with its bugs, any day. Preferably, give me a bleeding edge
Webkit :). I'm probably biased, though, as I've always hated the
virtual buffer concept that every screen reader except for Voiceover
uses. Then again, I was a fan of Outspoken so that probably tells
you something right there.
On Nov 15, 2008, at 00:26, Mike Arrigo wrote:
That does seem silly, Apple has already provided the accessibility
interfaces, why reinvent the wheel? By the way, how well does
firefox work with Orka?
On Nov 14, 2008, at 6:47 PM, Jacob Schmude wrote:
Actually, they said Firevox which is technically true, seeing as
how it's a speech extension to Firefox that has the ability to use
Mac's TTS engines. Honestly though it's pretty pathetic compared
to just about everything else, even Firefox under Linux with Orca
works better and that's saying quite a bit at this point.
Obviously Safari with Voiceover blows it out of the water.
I really wish Mozilla could swallow their pride and work with the
OS X accessibility APIs, but they seem determined to have it their
way or no way. They had a blog post on this a while back, and
basically summed it up that if Apple wouldn't open source
Voiceover or otherwise implement the Mozilla access APIs into it
they would never provide access on the Mac, with considerable
emphasis on open sourcing Voiceover. Honestly the whole thing came
off kind of childish to me, and is certainly counterproductive to
Mozilla's stated goals of providing access for everyone.
On Nov 14, 2008, at 19:38, Mike Arrigo wrote:
Another comment that Apple made was that fire fox is accessible,
unless something has changed, this is incorrect.
On Nov 14, 2008, at 12:40 PM, John Panarese wrote:
I agree. I must admit that I was both very surprised and quite
pleased. At least, it seems that A Mac was used and there was
much more thought put into this review.
As for Open Office, I would not say that it is fully accessible,
but it surely is usable on a daily basis if one needed an office
suite. The spreadsheet is surely quite impressive. The word
processor takes some getting used to, but, again, one can use it.
Take Care
John Panarese
On Nov 14, 2008, at 10:49 AM, Slau wrote:
----- Original Message ----- From: "kaare dehard" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>
It is certainly a more thoughtful
than the review done in 2005. I don't agree with all of it but
let's give em marks for effort this time round...
I agree. I was a staunch critic of the 2005 review by Jay
Leventhal but I sent him a message thanking him for a far
better evaluation this time around and thanks to Jim Denham for
his review.
Slau
