Orca & tbird issues

[Janina Sajka]

I just don't see any good reason for running a client like mutt in a gui
terminal with Orca. Yes, from the "let's get everything working like it
should" perspective, we need good performance and good behavior in gui
terminals, but mutt just runs so well in a console terminal (think
screen) with Speakup, that I just don't worry my poor little head over
the gui terminal.

It's rather interesting, though, that similar issues can sometimes crop
up in the console environment. I've recently been running Fedora 25
pre-release mutt v. 1.7.1 as my client, and I occasionally run into
focus problems, meaning that what Speakup's Keypad 8 will say is one off
from the actual selection. Usually the screen Ctrl+l "redraw the screen"
command fixes that.

Until the last mutt update there was a more annoying issue for me where
Home and End didn't work to take you to the top or bottom of the index
list. It was a bug, and I'm so glad it's now squashed.

As for replying to the wrong person, that just happens if one isn't
careful to observe the header data before sending. You don't need to be
blind and using a screen reader to exhibit that behavior. I see the very
same thing every so often from the very smart teckies on my various W3C
lists, most of who are perfectly able bodied.

Mutt does have one command I absolutely love, and I wonder whether the
gui clients have something similar. There's the usual 'r' for reply to
the sender, and 'g' for reply to all, but I particularly appreciate
Shift+L for "reply only to the lists, and not the individuals."

I must confess, though, that I'm impressed that people have found a
browser interface to email fully usable. To me this suggests that
familiarity with the particular environment is still the most important
factor for success with whatever one chooses to use.

Janina

Tim Chase writes:
> On November  9, 2016, Jeffery Mewtamer wrote:
> > Personally, I've never seen the point of e-mail clients and have
> > always used a web browser to check my e-mail. 
> 
> I think the big advantage is off-line usage.  If you are connected
> all the time and have dual-mode access for redundancy (say, a home
> internet/wifi connection, and a 4G aircard), and don't roam much,
> then a web-based mail client solves a lot of problems.  But when
> internet access is spotty or unreliable, it's nice to have full
> access to your email offline.  Fortunately, there are lots of
> options, both within the GUI with varying degrees of accessibility
> (Thunderbird, Kmail, Claws Mail, and Evolution come to mind) and
> within the terminal (mutt and alpine being the dominant players, but
> "alot" and mailx/heirloom mailx also come to mind as well as several
> available within emacs).
> 
> -tim
> 
> 
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-- 

Janina Sajka,	Phone:	+1.443.300.2200
			sip:janina at asterisk.rednote.net
		Email:	janina at rednote.net

Linux Foundation Fellow
Executive Chair, Accessibility Workgroup:	http://a11y.org

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI)
Chair, Accessible Platform Architectures	http://www.w3.org/wai/apa