I'm Tony Baechler. Probably others will comment, but having looked at the
NVDA git repo and following the Orca list, I would like to clarify some things.
On 4/23/2017 2:54 PM, Linux for blind general discussion wrote:
And even if the NV association had any interest in branching out, I
suspect they'd be more interested in porting NVDA than improving other
projects, and depending on how much NVDA depends on Windows specific
APIs, that might just lead to slower development on the Windows side
without providing a decent Orca alternative under Linux.
Yes, this is correct. Actually, NVDA is written in Python and borrows code
from Orca. Look at the credits some time. However, as you say, it's very
specific to Windows and would be impossible to port to any other OS without
a rewrite. It hooks directly into app accessibility like Orca and unlike
other Windows screen readers. That's why in my opinion I get a much better
Firefox experience than with Window-Eyes. It's very much closer to how Orca
works. Pages are buffered and read much faster. It has an equivalent of
forms or browse mode, but switches in and out automatically as you come to a
form field, such as an edit box. While I think it would be good for the
projects to work together, as Kyle said, I don't see it happening. NVDA, for
example, uses custom Braille drivers and a modified ESpeak.
understand it, Orca doesn't wrok well at all in desktop enviornments
other than Gnome and Mate).
This is partially true, but because those other desktops don't have built-in
accessibility. In Windows, a screen reader tries to make every app
accessible, whether that's a browser, media player, calculator, etc. That's
why you learn a set of keyboard commands for your screen reader and expect
them to work everywhere. This mostly works, but not always. NVDA and Orca
use the opposite approach. Rely on the apps themselves to provide
accessibility hooks. QT works much better in NVDA than Window-Eyes, even
though WE claims to have QT support. KDE doesn't have accessibility hooks
like Gnome, MATE and Unity do, so no, Orca won't work. I read that XFCE has
some accessibility support. LibreOffice in Linux works much better than in
Windows, at least last time I tried.
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