On Sun, Nov 25, 2012 at 11:00 PM, John J. Boyer <john.boyer@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > Well, I'm wondering if LibreOffice on 6.3 is accessible and whether it > will be difficult to get Orca working on that OS. So it would be nice if > you test those things. I'm not the best person to test Orca. I've never used it and don't understand Braille. (I'm low vision and so far have got by with magnification.) But I don't think it will be a problem for the following reasons: 1. Orca is on the package list for Red Hat Enterprise 6.x. <http://tinyurl.com/ct6wdej>. CentOS is Red Hat Enterprise with only the Red Hat trademarks and art changed. 2. Orca was developed under the leadership of the Accessibility Program Office of Sun Microsystems, Inc. (now Oracle), working from the concept and prototype developed by a blind Sun programmer named Mark Mulcahy. Sun had very strong accessibility integration emphasis in all of its apps, which included OpenOffice.org, from which LibreOffice was later forked. 3. OpenOffice.org had a few remaining accessiblity warts at the time that the Commonwealth of Massachusetts proposed to specify OpenDocument Formats as the only formats to be used in state government for word processing. Microsoft responded to that proposal by mobilizing the accessibilty community to oppose the proposal because of the few remaining accessiblity warts in OpenOffice.org and the OpenDocument Formats. That sparked a major effort by the OpenDocument Formats technical committee (I was a member at the time) and by Sun (under the leadership of its accessibility executive Peter Korn (a blind programmer himself) to clear the accessibility warts in both the OpenDocument formats and in OOo. (This was the reason for the release of OpenDocument Formats v. 1.1.) 3. The fork of LibreOffice from OpenOffice.org occurred a couple of years later, when Oracle acquired Sun and almost immediately ended support for OOo and ODF. IBM had been recycling OOo code in its programs pursuant to a license it had obtained from Sun Microsystems. But that was no longer workable because the project was dead and IBM did not have commit rights to add new code to the source code. OOo became a dead project for nearly a year, until IBM persuaded Oracle to deed the source code to the Apache Foundation, where the new project would license source code under the permissive Apache license rather than the LGPL. This was important to IBM because all of its relevant software using ODF was proprietary closed source. To recyle the OOo code in its products, needed OOo to be licensed under a permissive license. 4. Meanwhile, LibreOffice development proceeded and added new features, whose code cannot be used in OpenOffice.org because of license differences. However, any patches added to OpenOffice.org can be applied to LibreOffice because of the permissive Apache license. This situation practically guarantees that LibreOffice will stay out in front of OpenOffice.org in terms of software quality and featues. 5. Because of such factors and because LibreOffice is licensed under the LGPL, which requires that all distributed modifications be contributed back to the community whereas the Apache license allows modifications to be kept proprietary and secret, most distro developers have either switched to LibreOffice or are planning to. LibreOffice is FLOSS, whereas OpenOffice.org no longer is. 6. Since version 2.16, Orca has been part of the Gnome desktop, which is what is used in the default Red Hat Enterprise and CentOS v. 6.x installation. 7. So in sort there shouldn't be any accessibility issues with using Orca and LibreOffice on CentOS 6.3. Best regards, Paul _______________________________________________ Blinux-list mailing list Blinux-list@xxxxxxxxxx https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/blinux-list