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It is so nice to know that you are aware of these issues.  Over the
years, I have learned to resign myself to settle for such suboptimal
solutions as the ones I described in my posting and put the best face
on it that I could.  If Libre Office could be made accessible out of
the box for all screen readers regardless of the platform, it would be
a truly fantastic thing!

Regards,
Alex M
On 1/3/11, Christophe Strobbe <christophe.strobbe@esat.kuleuven.be> wrote:

At 03:15 8/12/2010, Alex Midence wrote:
Thing is, some apps that can only be navigated with the Jaws cursor
can be scripted such that they become accessible.  If the Jaws cursor
can see it, the invisible cursor can too, usually.  I managed to make
some progress wtih Open Office this way.

This is great to hear, even though it is not the best solution. There
are several reasons for this:
* scripts can break when the user interface changes,
* JAWS scripts are specific to JAWS and don't help users of other
screen readers,
* scripts are not part of the standard download of
OpenOffice/LibreOffice, not are they downloadable from
http://www.openoffice.org/ or http://www.documentfoundation.org/ so
users need to actively search for them [1].



Some of the controls I could
only access with the jaws cursor might be made accessible through
hotkeys set to change from pc to invisible and then back to pc again
at the click of a key.  In the end, what may happen is that Libre
Office is made to be scriptably accessible  which is ok, I guess
though out of the box accessibility would be nice.

In my opinion, built-in accessibility is not just "nice", it should
be the default.


[1] Moreover: "Freedom Scientific does not typically accept
unsolicited offers of scripts for third party applications."
<http://www.freedomscientific.com/fs_support/BulletinView.asp?QC=792>.
JAWS users are referred to sites such as <http://www.JFWlite.com/>
and <http://www.BlindProgramming.com/>.

Best regards,

Christophe Strobbe



Alex M


On 12/7/10, Octavian Rasnita <orasnita@gmail.com> wrote:
Well, if an interface is accessible only by using the JAWS cursor, we
can
say that it is really inaccessible, because it is not an application
that
can be currently used.
The edit fields where we should type strings are not accessible and the
other controls are very hard to find with the JAWS cursor...

Octavian

----- Original Message -----
From: "Alex Midence" <alex.midence@gmail.com>
To: <accessibility@libreoffice.org>
Sent: Tuesday, December 07, 2010 5:37 PM
Subject: Re: [libreoffice-accessibility] Laws and standards


SWT is indeed more accessible.   I think the only parts of Libre
Office that are in Java are those tied to the database.  Most of the
code is in c and c++, I heard.  Btw, QT is somewhat supported.  I
wouldn't call it stellar but it's not impossible to navigate witha
jaws cursor.  (Mouse simulator)  Idle, for instance, is in QT.  I dn't
see them rewriting the code to use swt classes though.  Besides, I
think this creates issues in Gnome since swt is less accessible there
than swing.

alex M

On 12/7/10, Octavian Rasnita <orasnita@gmail.com> wrote:
From: "Christophe Strobbe" <christophe.strobbe@esat.kuleuven.be>
Hi Alex,

At 02:25 7/12/2010, Alex Midence wrote:
Well, my thinking is and always will be that Libre Office is better
off making itself accessible no matter what screen reader is used.


That is why LibreOffice (like OpenOffice.org) needs to support
accessibility APIs, keyboard access, desktop themes, etcetera. For a
screen reader to work with an application, the application needs to
implement the accessibility API (for example the Java Accessibility
API, which is not tied to a specific operating system), and the
screen reader needs to support that API. As far as I know, screen
readers on Windows have generally weak support for the Java
Accessibility
API.


True, although the screen readers for Windows have a weak support for
SWING
API. The support for SWT is much better.

But the screen readers for Windows have a non-existent support for
other
GUIs like Tk, GTK, QT...


(Note: Java accessibility on Windows requires the Java Access Bridge.
Oracle is working on a new version of this bridge that will be part
of the Java Runtime Environment instead of a separate download.)

This will be great, but hopefully the screen readers manufacturers will
also
offer a better support for SWING.

JAWS for Windows offer some support for Java Access Bridge as it is
now,
but
only in a virtual buffer, so the apps are seen like web pages.

SWING is slower than SWT anyway, and that weak support offered by JAWS
makes
the apps much less responsive, but what's the most important for blind
programmers is that it is very hard if impossible to make the design of
the
GUI, because in the SWING apps, JAWS doesn't offer that "JAWS cursor"
for
allowing us to "see" the position of each window control on the screen.

I heard that Window Eyes started to offer a better support for SWING
than
JAWS but I haven't tested it.

By the way, what interface is LibreOffice using? I've tested OpenOffice
and
it was pretty accessible although I don't remember if I had Java Access
Bridge installed. Does it use something else than SWING?

Thanks.

Octavian


--
Christophe Strobbe
K.U.Leuven - Dept. of Electrical Engineering - SCD
Research Group on Document Architectures
Kasteelpark Arenberg 10 bus 2442
B-3001 Leuven-Heverlee
BELGIUM
tel: +32 16 32 85 51
http://www.docarch.be/
Twitter: @RabelaisA11y
---
"Better products and services through end-user empowerment"
www.usem-net.eu - www.stand4all.eu
---
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