Orca & tbird issues

[Janina Sajka]

Don't confuse Speakup and Espeak, and espeakup. These are three separate
packages that perform three related, but separate functions.

Example: You can use Speakup with other TTS engines, like the ones that
Windows people call Eloquence.

Having said that, I would suggest your problem is one of familiarity
with the screen reader. There's no reason to have the problem you're
experiencing with Speakup. You have much much more control over what is,
and isn't spoken by Speakup, though the control is not object based as
it is with Orca and other gui environments. Those of us who are quite
long in the tooth will surely recall that Speakup works a lot like asap
did in DOS--which I'm guessing you're too young to know about.

As always, the advice is to use the tools that work best for you. We're
all different people with different skills and proclivities. There's
nothing wrong with that, and there's everything right with have a
plethera of tools to select from. But, kindly don't blame the tool!

Janina

Jeffery Mewtamer writes:
> One reason I'm stuck using Knoppix instead of Vanilla Debian is that I
> find espeakup's screen review functionality far less intuitive
> compared to SBL, the text-mode screen reader included in Knoppix's
> Adriane accessibility suite. Plus, when I'm scrolling through a text
> document in nano or package lists in aptitude, it's confusing when
> espeakup decides to read the line that just scrolled on screen instead
> of the line that the cursor was just moved to.
> 
> I do like how espeakup will automatically read the position
> information in nano when I press crtl+C instead of needing to use
> screen review to read that line in SBL and how I don't need screen
> review to have espeakup read output from Frotz and other text-mode
> ZCod Virtual Machines, but SBL is still the overall better text-mode
> screen reader in my opinion. Sadly, I've never gotten the knoppix .deb
> to run on a Debian system, and it's i386 only so I couldn't use the
> .deb on 64-bit or ARM debian anyways. To make matters worse, aside
> from Knoppix, I know of no attempts to port SBL to any distro aside
> from Suse where it originated, and I've been using Debian-based
> distros for so long that learning an RPM distro would probably be more
> trouble than its worth.
> 
> Also, while Gmail's HTML view works well with Firefox and Orca, it's
> pretty much unusable in elinks with either SBL or espeakup. Then
> again, I find elinks unusable in general and every other text-mode
> browser even worse, which is a real shame since Firefox is the only
> graphical program I use and Firefox, Orca, and the minimalist X-server
> I use to run them accountt for most of my root partition's used space.
> 
> Granted, even Firefox would be borderline unusable if not for all the
> handy navigation shortcuts Orca adds. Being able to press numrow 3 to
> jump straight to the links to folders with unread messages or my
> contacts link or pressing x to jump to the checkbox for
> selecting/unslecting a message that happens to have the participants
> and subject as it's label and being a single tab from the link that
> will open the conversation is really handy. I try loading Gmail in
> elinks, and I can't even tell if focus is on a link in the folder list
> or a link in the message list. It's enough to wish my programming
> skills were advanced enough to make patches for elinks that would add
> the navigation shortcuts Orca adds to Firefox and to force elinks to
> display multi-column webpages in a single column.
> 
> -- 
> Sincerely,
> 
> Jeffery Wright
> President Emeritus, Nu Nu Chapter, Phi Theta Kappa.
> Former Secretary, Student Government Association, College of the Albemarle.
> 
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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