I confess, I kind of like the anonymity this list provides, though I understand how that can make some of my posts harder to follow when I reference things I said in previous posts. As for quoting, while it can be useful in some circumstances, I find that for every post that quotes just what needs to be quoted, there seems to be a dozen that quote huge chunks of the conversation in a way that actually makes it harder, not easier, to tell what specific points are being replied to. Not so bad when the reply is at the top and I can skip over the quoted wall of text by jumping to the heading marking the start of the next message in the Gmail conversation(I'm using Gmail's basic HTML view and have no interest in using a dedicated e-mail client), but it's annoying as heck when there's a paragraph or two baried between a wall of quotes and the overly long footer the list attaches to every message(thankfully, said footer is collapsed most of the time). Between this and quote pyramids on forums(added annoyance there, there's usually a border around quotes on forums that renders the innermost quote with incredibly short, choppy lines), I tend to err on the side of under quoting as a conditioned counter balance to all the people on the Internet who over quote... and my annoyance with over quoting likely was older when I went blind than my blindness is now, though the inability to just tune out the quotes and scroll past has only reinforced said annoyance. As for being "part of the OS" versus "something you have to install manually", I think something worth remembering is that nearly every Linux distro in existence, thanks to the FOSS model making it much easier to include third party software, comes bundled with huge chunks of software you'd have to manually install on a fresh install of Windows(and probably OSX as well). I haven't regularly used Windows since the XP days, but unless things have changed drastically, about all one can do with a fresh install of non-OEM Windows is system administration, play solitaire, browse the web, edit text files, draw pictures in paint, and maybe play lowest common denominator media files... by comparison, some of the more full-featured Linux distros come preloaded with a full office suite, multiple web browsers, full-featured image editing for both raster and vector graphics, multiple text editors, multiple media players(both audio-only and video), and sometimes multiple Desktop Environments... and that's just the short list.. And yes, Orca comes preloaded on many distros... and many distros come preloaded with a console screen reader, though it might be disabled by default unless you do a console-only install with a talking installer... but I'm not sure that's fundamentally different from many distros coming pre-loaded with both Firefox and Chromium... Or to put it another way, it's like Windows just gives you the base system and the default Desktop Environment while most Linux distros give you the base system, a choice of Desktop environments(including the option to not have one), and a ton of supplementary software. And don't newer versions of Windows come preloaded with narrator? Though, like with most things Microsoft, it never seems to be treated as a major option in the app wars. And while it's true screen readers are mostly used by the blind, I don't think they're inheritantly a blind product... Compare audiobooks, it use to be that about the only source for audiobooks was government run "Library for the Blind" type services, and now you have significant numbers of sighted people downloading or streaming audiobooks from mainstream services, sometimes just because they're too lazy to read a book themselves, sometimes as an alternative to fill the silence when their eyes or hands are too busy with something else to focus on the page or hold a book/eReader... and lately, YouTube has been spamming me with ads for a Chromium extension that reads web pages... and the narration makes it obvious the ad is targetting sighted users. Heck, I recently replied to a question on Quora about computer related eye strain and suggested NVDA/Orca/Talkback/Voiceover depending on the platform as a way for sighted people to give their eyes a rest without having to stop their reading... and were my vision miraculously restored tomorrow, I suspect I'd keep Orca as part of my tool kit... if nothing else, the navigational hotkeys are so darn useful I have to wonder how I got by without them back when I had a functioning eyeball and why they aren't a standard part of every web browser in existence... and well, if text-to-speech reaches the point where a critical mass of sighted people find it useful, that can only help those for whom it is not just a nice to have, but a necessity. _______________________________________________ Blinux-list mailing list Blinux-list@xxxxxxxxxx https://listman.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/blinux-list