On Sun, Jan 05, 2003 at 05:05:30PM -0600, Brent Harding wrote: > I would switch to exclusively linux if a screen reader for x was available > and usable. I heard one is in the works for gnome, is that true? Where can > I get a beta to try it? You can't. It's pre-alpha. Thus...not quite ready for prime-time. Still, you can get it from CVS on the GNOME CVS server, whose information I currently do not have. Then I'd have the equivalent of jfw for linux, No you wouldn't. ... Right now, it doesn't (I understand) work to do useful things yet. Once it does work and is useful for things like OpenOffice, Mozilla, etc., you still won't have the equivalent of JFW for several reasons: 1. It is free software. Free. You know, as in beer, as well as in liberty. That means you have the freedoms to use it, benefit from it, distribute it, modify it, and distribute modified copies of it. (See www.gnu.org) 2. It will actually, oh, I dunno, be stable. > which we all wished existed, it'd be called JFL instead of JFW, and It most certainly would *NOT* be called JFL! JAWS is: 1. Proprietary software. 2. Copy protected. 3. Expensive. 4. Made by a company whose business practices are, at best, slimy. No indeed. It will not be called JFL. It will not be JFanything. It is not JAWS. It will not be JAWS. It will never, ever, ever be JAWS. It is fundamentally different. Certainly in philosophy. (BTW, it's called gnopernicus.) > probably work a lot better than win-98. Egads man, that's a given! BTW, GNU/Linux is very usable, even without X. True, having an X screen reader will be great...we can use the same word processors as our colleagues and exchange documents easier. We can do word processing without having to learn a markup language. We can use these crappified Javascripted Web pages that don't work with the cat or the chain. But even without all that, GNU/Linux is very, very usable indeed with the tools currently available. I have one machine that is Debian GNU/Linux only. My wife's machine spends the majority of its time in a Debian GNU/Linux environment (she uses GNOME 2.0 with enlarged fonts and things). She uses Windows for the few pages that don't play in Mozilla properly, or to play her Windows games, or what-not. But we are primarily a free software household here and are no less efficient for it. -- Buddy Brannan, KB5ELV/3 | "And if the ground yawned, Phone: (814) 455-7333 | I'd step to the side and say, Email: davros@ycardz.com | "Hey ground! I'm nobody's lunch!" http://www.ycardz.com/ | --Eddie From Ohio