Hi, Staroffice runs under X windows, so in its standard form, I would say that it is not accessable to blind people. If your only need is to read ms-word documents, there are two viewers that works ok. The one is called wv and is on the redhat cd set. The other one is catdoc and can be found on the net. I have it here and can send it to you. Catdoc is like the linux cat command but for ms-word documents. I ended up using it more to listen to the ms documents that is sent to me. Staroffice does read ms documents. It can also save documents in the ms-word format sothat ms-word users can read/edit what you have written. The interaction between staroffice and ms is reported to be better in version 6.0 beta than in Staroffice 5.2, but the beta seem to have some other bugs which might be sorted out in the full release. My wife exclusivly use Staroffice. regards, Willem