Re: Gnome and support for the visually impaired

[Thomas Ward <tward1978 earthlink net>]

Hi,
Bill is right. We shouldn't sell the Gnome access to short yet. After
all there is work that needs to be done, but we have achieved huge
breakthroughs in access already.
For example, three years ago i could do nothing at all in Gnome. Now, 
I daily use Evolution for my email, mozilla as my default web browser,
gedit as my text editor for programming, and Open Office is doing more
work that is MS Office, although Opencalc leaves much to be desired over
Excel. Especially, with the new Window Eyes support for Excel open
source needs to catch up.
In addition now that I got gaim working I use that as my default AOL
instant messenger. 
Gnome maybe not at a one to one footing with Windows access, and at this
point we can't brab xforge and expect it to work. However, that doesn't
mean gnopernicus and orka etc haven't mmade huge progress already.
Hth.

On Thu, 2005-09-29 at 15:15 +0100, Bill Haneman wrote:
> Samuel:
> 
> It is vital to our survival that we do not agree too quickly with such 
> people.  We do already have end users who are using gnopernicus to carry 
> our their daily work; without our existing work, as it already is, this 
> would not be possible.
> 
> There are four open source assistive technologies directly using the 
> AT-SPI framework already, and two of them are screenreaders.  Both are 
> under active development, so we should be careful not to undersell what 
> we have achieved.  I agree that there is a lot of work left to do, but 
> we have the great advantage of having done the work in the open where 
> all can contribute to its improvement.
> 
> Bill
> 
> Samuel Thibault wrote:
> 
> >Hi,
> >
> >Dave Lister, le Thu 29 Sep 2005 21:33:45 +0800, a écrit :
> >  
> >
> >>The following have emailed Mass. regarding the lack of support in Open Source for the blind or visually impaired. Do you have any information to the contrary. If so do you mind informing them of such.
> >>    
> >>
> >
> >Well, I cannot but say that I unfortunately do agree with those people:
> >really usable graphical screen reader don't yet exist on linux. And
> >these people need to use graphical application for their jobs.
> >
> >There _are_ efforts on this, and on the long run those people will
> >really have _better_ access to free software than to proprietary
> >software (so that shifting to free software _is_ a good idea). But
> >for now, it seems that gnopernicus is far from providing the same
> >accessibility as JAWS.
> >
> >My 2¢,
> >Regards,
> >Samuel
> >_______________________________________________
> >gnome-accessibility-list mailing list
> >gnome-accessibility-list gnome org
> >http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/gnome-accessibility-list
> >  
> >
> 
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