Brad, Thanks for both trying and reporting your experience. I don't see myself switching away from MS Office anytime soon, but to have these free applications at long last accessible will surely be important for anyone unable to afford MS products. If I weren't already invested in MS Office, I'd consider this option.
-----Original Message----- From: Jfw [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Brad Martin via Jfw Sent: Thursday, May 01, 2014 11:47 PM To: The Jaws for Windows support list. Subject: Re: OpenOffice, more accessible? Ok, I decided to be the test subject. I've attempted to use Open Office in the past with marginal success at best. After reading this message, I installed it on my Win 7 machine running the very latest JFW15 update. I have to say, compared to my previous experiences with the product, it runs pretty darn well. There are a few oddities. For instance, when you're arrowing down the menu options under a particular menu (such as Format for instance), occasionally you will hear the words "Menu Bar." I didn't do a very exhaustive test, but I typed a sentence or two, changed the font, etc. I didn't have any trouble with the simple tasks I was performing. I will warn you that while it isn't exactly the same, you will feel like you're in Word 2003. That is to say there is a true menu bar--no ribbons. Again, not an exhaustive review by any means, but that's what I noticed in the fifteen minutes or so that I played with Open Office 4.1 To answer Ted's question, I think the download was 134 Megabytes. The connection was good though, because I downloaded it in roughly a minute. Brad On 5/1/2014 7:24 AM, Adrian Spratt via Jfw wrote: > I'm copying an item from Dean Martineau's Top Tech Tidbits newsletter this > morning because it sounds like a step forward for screenreader users. I'd > also be curious if OpenOffice really has become more accessible. Note that > Dean has stated his newsletter content can be distributed so long as it is > given attribution; otherwise, I wouldn't copy it verbatim. > > 1) A step forward has been made in accessibility to free Office suites with > the release of OpenOffice 4.1 with built-in iAccessible2 support. Screen > readers with this support should, in theory, be able to work with OO out of > the box, without the need to install Java Access Bridge. Reportedly, support > is best with NVDA, with the most recent update for JAWS, which works in most > places and forthcoming versions of Window-Eyes may also have support: > http://www.openoffice.org > > -------------- next part -------------- > An HTML attachment was scrubbed... > URL: > <http://lists.the-jdh.com/pipermail/jfw_lists.the-jdh.com/attachments/20140501/0e14b88b/attachment.html> > _______________________________________________ > Jfw mailing list > [email protected] > http://lists.the-jdh.com/mailman/listinfo/jfw_lists.the-jdh.com > _______________________________________________ Jfw mailing list [email protected] http://lists.the-jdh.com/mailman/listinfo/jfw_lists.the-jdh.com _______________________________________________ Jfw mailing list [email protected] http://lists.the-jdh.com/mailman/listinfo/jfw_lists.the-jdh.com
