Rest assured Sun Micro is working on making Star Office 6 accessible with Gnopernicus. How accessible it will be in the end is open to debate until it shows up. Coming up with a shell based wordprocessor would be dificult and time consuming, and in the end Gnome 2.0 will be out before any of us could complete a vary good release. ----- Original Message ----- From: Yvonne Smith <yvonne@xxxxxxxxxxxx> To: <speakup at braille.uwo.ca> Sent: Sunday, January 13, 2002 1:46 AM Subject: Re: anti-word > Good grief, a text mode word clone? The amount of work involved in > that would be out of this world. I think our only hope here, people, > is to hope the eventual speech access to gnome will give us access to > some of the word processors in Linux that save in word format. None of > them are perfect, but I think an xwindows screen reader would be a lot more > productive than trying to write such a beast. > And no, this is not a prelude to the "we don't need xwindows" rant > that I just know someone is going to reply to this with. I'm with you > on this, ok? I might not use speakup much, being a primarily emacspeak > user <no, *that* isn't worth going on a rant about either, I learnt > emacspeak first and only use speakup occasionally when necessary, > personal preference>. Basically I'm much happier in a console or in > emacs myself. All I'm saying is that, I can't imagine too many people > other than us would have a huge amount of use for a word processor > like that. I seem to have vague memories of a console version of word > perfect existing at one point, if you bought the commercial version > but don't quote me on it. I'm pretty sure it doesn't exist now in any > case. What I'm trying to say is, right now, we just have to live with > what we've got. If we want to do more than read word documents, we've > got to run windows until someone writes a screen reader that'll let us > use star office or something of the sort. If we want to use > javascript, we've got to use windows until someone writes a screen > reader that'll let us use netscape or Galion or something. I know, I > know, it's harsh, but most sighted people aren't going to write these > for us in console mode. They can already use all this stuff in x, and > open source, like it or not, usually involves people writing what they > personally have a use for. If none of us can or have the time to write > this stuff ourselves, most likely it isn't going to get done. > > I know, this is harsh, and is probably going to result in me being > flamed off the list, since I'm not a regular contributor, or a regular > user of speakup, but while I'm here, I thought I'd say it. The same > thing applies to kirk, and whoever else writes speakup. They'll write > what they need first, and afterwards what other people want if they > have the time and feel it's worth it. To get better service than that, > you've either got to get involved in a project that more closely > mirrors what you need in a program, learn to program yourself and > write it yourself, or live with the decisions that the programmers > make. That's just the way it is in the open source world, I'm > afraid. As someone who doesn't know, and probably never will know c or > c++, I'm in the same position as most of you. We can make suggestions, > we can make bug reports, and we can help new users with what we know > and they don't yet, to pay for what they give us, but that's about > it. > As it is, at least with speakup or emacspeak or something like that, > we can talk to the developers. It isn't going to cost us thousands of > dollars for access to what software's available and what we get might > more closely resemble what we want, rather than what primarily sighted > developers think we want. > > and finally, just to end this rant and reply to another thread, > hardware vs software synthe. again, software speech is something we're > all just going to have to live with. I prefer hardware speech myself, > but I'm not using it much right now. I'm moving around all the time, > often have limited space for things, and I just don't want to fuss > with the cables and junk that the hardware synthe brings. Not only > that, the amount a hardware synthe costs can put it out of reach for a > lot of people. Not to mention, using a laptop with a hardware speech > synthe can be a *major* pain in the neck, as a lot of you can > testify. It's not something to get into a religious war about. When > Tuxtalk is eventually written, those people who don't have a hardware > synthe, for whatever reason, will just have to live with the fact that > they won't be able to see the early bootup messages. 95% of times, > that doesn't matter at all. And in my case, I'll probably end up using > both, depending on which is more practical, so if I really get into > trouble, I can plug the hardware synthe in and figure out why it is > that my linux kernel has suddenly decided not to talk to me. But you > aren't going to lose what speakup can currently give you. If you're > still using hardware for speech, you'll still get the same output as > speakup has always given you, and people who can't or don't want to > use a hardware synthe will have access to the linux console, at least, > which'll probably bring more blind people into linux, which is a good > thing by anyones standards. > > Now I'm out of here before I rant any more, and going to duck into my > flameproof bunker for a while. > > _______________________________________________ > Speakup mailing list > Speakup at braille.uwo.ca > http://speech.braille.uwo.ca/mailman/listinfo/speakup
