Hello. I am new to this list and I hope that my comments are being directed to the right group. If they should be directed to another list, please let me know and I will comply with the proper guidelines. First, I'll introduce myself by telling you that I'm visually impaired, am a user and teacher of several screen readers and I have been in the assistive technology field, providing training and support to blind and visually impaired computer users for over twenty years. I'm a big fan and advocate of open source software. At home, I use NVDA as my screen reader. At work, I also use JAWS, Window-eyes, MAGic and Zoomtext. I've been working on and off with various versions of OpenOffice for some time, doing some accessibility testing with screen readers and wanted to report on how the latest 4.1 beta is working with today's screen readers. First, I'll tell you that I've been doing my testing on a Windows 7 Pro 32-bit system. We have NVDA 2014.1, the latest build of JAWS 15 and Window-eyes 8.4. As of this writing, these are the latest publicly available versions of these programs. I suppose that NVDA is an exception, since they release master and next builds of current snapshots but I have not tested the latest versions of these snapshots. First, I am absolutely thrilled that OpenOffice is implementing IAccessible2. In theory, this should make the programs extremely compatible with today's screen readers. The two programs I've been working with are Writer and Calc. I have not done extensive testing yet but just want to make sure I can easily track documents, menus and dialogs without any real drama. So far, NVDA handles OO4.1 the best, tracking the caret with no issues and reading cell coordinates in Calc. Window-eyes 8.4 consistently crashes whenever I try to open Writer or Calc. I wrote to GW Micro's support. They wrote back, asking how they could duplicate the problem and soon afterward they told me that a post 8.4 build was not experiencing any issues. It is likely that I will have to wait for the next public beta of Window-eyes to be posted before I can do any further testing. JAWS 15 was totally unreliable in Calc, not reading most of the cells as I use arrow keys to move through them. Occasionally, cell info was read but not most of the time. Writer's performance with JAWS was a bit better but still inconsistent. Here are the comments I sent to Freedom Scientific.
1. When in Writer, when I type the first line of text in a document and press enter, JAWS says "edit Has Flows From." This does not seem to happen when pressing enter for subsequent lines. 2. When reviewing a document in Writer 4.1, sometimes one line will be read when I'm actually reading another. As an example, if I move from the second line down to the third line, JAWS sometimes still reads the second line. This behavior does not always occur but it happens regularly enough that I felt it should be reported. Once, while reviewing a document character by character, JAWS says "blank" instead of the actual character under the cursor and I had to perform a screen refresh. Freedom Scientific's initial response was disappointing, indicating that JAWS currently does not support OpenOffice and then I was told about their support for Microsoft Office. While I have nothing against screen readers supporting Microsoft Office, many of my consumers can't easily afford another expensive piece of software and they deserve a good, solid, robust alternative. I attempted to convey this in my reply and later spoke with John Carson in their escalation department about this, who told me that he would report it to the appropriate people in product development. I don't necessarily think that what I'm finding are OpenOffice bugs, which is why I haven't filed any tickets as bug reports. I just wanted to give those interested on the list a report about my initial findings. If there are specific things you'd like me to test or play with, please let me know as I'd be happy and honored to assist. David Goldfield http://davidgoldfield.wordpress.com David Goldfield Computer Technology Instructor 919 Walnut Street 4th Floor Philadelphia, PA 19107 215-627-0600 ext 3277 FAX: 215-922-0692 dgold...@asb.org<mailto:dgold...@asb.org> www.asb.org<http://www.asb.org> Serving Philadelphia's and the nation's blind and visually impaired population since 1874. www.asb.org<http://www.facebook.com/pages/Associated-Services-for-the-Blind/234389409941928> www.asb.org<http://twitter.com/ASBPhiladelphia>
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