[macvoiceover] Re: VO, OpenOffice, Tables

You're probably right and I remain confused about which API works where in what software these days. this ATIA is pretty dull with the JAWS WAI/Aria stuff the coolest new technology anyone is showing on the software side so I should have some time to reorient myself and catch up on how compatibility is acheived among the more popular cross- platform programs. 

On Jan 31, 2009, at 10:39 AM, David Poehlman wrote:
according to the mozilla blog, there is no compatibility box at least not for accessibility. the only thing we have is fire vox ad on which is not really worth considering. 

On Jan 31, 2009, at 10:34 AM, Chris Hofstader wrote:
I thought someone from Mozilla had told me that rather than talking to three different accessibility API that they built something of a compatibility box for Leopard. Peter Korn may have confirmed this but I can easily be wrong and mixed up between iAccessible2 and Macintosh API layers.
For years all I looked at was Windows but participated in cross platform standards committees. We tried hard to create a universal API but, as deadlines will always produce, MS had to quit first to get what we had plus some of their proprietary stuff into Vista, Apple stopped when they had to get their API for Macintosh into Leopard, Sun and IBM remained until the end which resulted in the gnome API.
Trying to support all three (or four if you consider that MS has iAccessible2 and UIA) in a single application would be real daredevil programming. Of course, bridge like code is a mess as well. 

Happy Hacking,
cdh





On Jan 31, 2009, at 9:31 AM, Jacob Schmude wrote:


Hi Chris
What is this converter of which you speak? I'm not aware of any gnome-Mac accessibility bridge, OO is interfacing to the Mac accessibility APIs I believe. On Windows, OO currently uses the java access bridge unless that's changed as of a month or so ago. You might have noticed that OO's accessibility with Voiceover, while decent, is nowhere near what you get with Orca. OO has to expose this information to the Mac APIs and they have not exposed all of it as of yet. iWork is Apple's office suite which, as of the most recent version, has very good accessibility. Weren't you playing with it a while back? I thought I remember you asking questions about how to use Numbers (the spreadsheet app in iWork), but maybe I'm mistaken. 

On Jan 31, 2009, at 09:17, Chris Hofstader wrote:


What is iWork?
It's odd that OO tables do not work with VO as they do with orca and JAWS which get their data from the same accessibility API. VO has a convertor that takes gnome accessibility information and converts it to the Macintosh which should make fixing this problem relatively straight forward. I have only minimal experience hacking Macintosh but might take a look at the source for tables on Windows and/or GNU/Linux and poke around the convertor for Leopard and see if it isn't too hard to deal with on my own.
I need to be cautious that I don't cause too much RSI pain on "hobby" hacking projects like this one as I need to be healthy for my other, full time projects. Reading code, however, shouldn't be too abusive on this crunchy old body and I have lots of hacker friends who I can ask to help if I can narrow the problem set down to a fairly limited number of changes. 

Happy Hacking,
cdh


On Jan 30, 2009, at 11:40 AM, Jacob Schmude wrote:


Hi Chris
OO does not have accessibility for tables as of yet. The only application in which we can currently access tables is iWork 09. Hopefully the OO team will get this fixed, though as of the latest RC builds there has been no change in Voiceover access with it. Your document is most likely larger due to default fonts. Windows and Mac do not always have the same fonts installed, and when you don't have a particular font OO will revert to the default. One nice thing iWork will do, when this happens, is notify you of the missing fonts, but as far as I know OO doesn't do this. 

On Jan 30, 2009, at 10:02, Chris Hofstader wrote:


Hi,
I received a relatively important document about the Raising the Floor Initiative, my new full time home, which was announced to the general public at ATIA yesterday, that contained a number of tables and had been made in Word. When I get to a table using OO, things start to go strange. I cannot seem to interact with the table in a predictable manner and could not read it without moving it onto a PC and using MS Office. Is there any documentation on OO with VO and tables?
Also, OO made the document a bit larger, moving a one page position paper type document into two pages which I'll assume had something to do with formatting defaults. 

Happy Hacking,
cdh


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