[nvda] Re: open office accessibility?

What has made this an issue of late is that in order to save cash, our charity has gone over to Open Office in the computers. It of course now means that a blind person cannot use the system. 

Anyway, thanks.

Brian
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----- Original Message ----- From: "Peter op 't Hof" <opthofp@xxxxxxxxx> 
To: <nvda@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Friday, July 25, 2008 11:22 AM
Subject: [nvda] Re: open office accessibility?



Brian,
I am back from a week holliday and try to do my best to boost things up here in the Netherlands. 
Keep you all informed.

Greetings,

Peter.
----- Original Message ----- From: "Brian Gaff" <bglists@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> 
To: <nvda@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Friday, July 18, 2008 11:38 AM
Subject: [nvda] Re: open office accessibility?
With respect though. We do not want to wait, why should we, its been too long already. 

Brian
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----- Original Message ----- From: "Peter op 't Hof" <opthofp@xxxxxxxxx> 
To: <nvda@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Friday, July 18, 2008 8:44 AM
Subject: [nvda] Re: open office accessibility?



Hi,
As a blind member of the Open-Doc Society and Openoffice.org i can clearly say that under Linux there are less problems then for Windows or Mac. 
In the ODF itself there is accessibility from the beginning.
Where the pain is situated is the guis of the operatingsystems.
John is right there.
Sun has prommiced support for KDE to provide the Gnome approach for Orca to KDE. Also there is talk between Sun and Microsoft to provide an new mediating layer between MSAA and Iaccess2. 

In the coming weeks i have several meetings about the progress.
Please contact me if you want to have more information.
You can find more profile information about me on Linkedin.com.

With regards,

Peter op 't Hof.

Http://www.blindict.nl
----- Original Message ----- From: "John Greer" <jpgreer@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> 
To: <nvda@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Friday, July 18, 2008 9:18 AM
Subject: [nvda] Re: open office accessibility?
It is still a bit concerning though because you and I both know Open Office has been claiming accessibility support for around 5 years now and still even the simplest thing such as the first time set up dialogs have never been touched by the open office developers to make them even have so much as a tab stop put in them. I have also just tested Open Office 3 beta 2 and it is the exact same situation. I do hope the Open Office development team understands that there are going to be alot of people in the blind community watching what happens with the 3.0 release of Open Office. Personally I wish the developers of all of the platforms, Windows, Linux and Apple would not use the blind community as a political marketing tool and give us the equal access and the cross platform applications that the sighted community has available to them. But it just seems to me that all of these big companies are all too caught up in their own competition to see. The whole you should use Windows because it is better, you should use Linux because it is better, you should use Mac because it is better is stupid. They all do the same thing just as well as each other, it is just a matter of what flavor you prefer. Sadly though on the Linux open source side of things many people have been so brainwashed into believing this burger war thing that many refuse to even help if it is not Linux based. There are even internal wars taking place between Gnome desktop and KDE. Neither wants to help the other do anything for each other. It does seem that the KDE desktop developed yet another accessibility API for programmers to have to support. It is usually hard enough for programmers to support one, so who suffers for it is us the blind community. ----- Original Message ----- From: "James Teh" <jamie@xxxxxxxxxxx> 
To: <nvda@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Friday, July 18, 2008 12:37 AM
Subject: [nvda] Re: open office accessibility?



Ok. Allow me to provide some clarification here.
First of all, as far as I know, OpenOffice does not use Java to present most of its GUI. It does support some Java components, but the core is not based on Java. The Java runtime is not required to run OpenOffice. OpenOffice uses its own GUI toolkit; i.e. it does not use platform native controls.
With regard to accessibility, MSAA unfortunately lacks support for rich accessibility functionality such as editable text and rich, complex documents. MSAA was essentially designed to make dialogs and associated controls accessible. As a result, in order to provide such accessibility, screen readers must either use video information, native widget APIs or a combination thereof. For example, Windows has a native API (not specifically designed for accessibility) which can be used to inspect a standard edit control. This is what NVDA uses to gain access to such controls.
Therefore, Sun (the developers of OpenOffice) could not use MSAA alone to provide access to OpenOffice. They needed some other API. Since they're not using native Windows controls and those controls weren't designed for such complex documents anyway, they opted to use another accessibility API. They could have used MSAA to provide access to some of the basic controls (dialogs, etc.), but rather than implement accessibility using several APIs, they chose to use a different accessibility API for everything.
Enter the Java accessibility API. This API provided the rich accessibility they required to access both simple and complex controls; it is far more advanced than MSAA. Unfortunately, the problem is, as you are all very much aware, that the Java accessibility API requires the Java runtime and the Java access bridge, which is a nuisance. On top of that, screen reader support for Java has been somewhat lacking, although (shameless plug) NVDA does provide semi decent support for this.
Note that on Linux, the situation is somewhat different. ATK/AT-SPI (the accessibility API for Gnome/GTK) was designed somewhat later than MSAA and thus provides the rich accessibility required by an application such as OpenOffice. Thus, the native accessibility API can be used to provide accessibility, so everything works nicely.
Enter IAccessible2. This is a new accessibility API for Windows which extends IAccessible (MSAA), largely based on the afforementioned rich accessibility APIs. OpenOffice are in the process of implementing IAccessible2 support. Once this is done, the Java access bridge will no longer be required and we can all live happily ever after.
So, while I'm not that happy about this situation myself, it's good to understand the reasons behind all of this before we start flaming and being otherwise negative. 

Jamie

Derek Roberts wrote:

Hi,
You can attack java for that, that's what they're using. Otherwise why 
would they use a java bridge? It's the custom java gui thing.


--
James Teh
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Thank you for your continued support of Nonvisual Desktop Access, an open source free screen reader for Microsoft Windows: 
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To get the latest NVDA snapshot:
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Report bugs or make feature requests at:
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Thank you for your continued support of Nonvisual Desktop Access, an open source free screen reader for Microsoft Windows: 
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To get the latest NVDA snapshot:
http://www.nvda-project.org/snapshots/
Report bugs or make feature requests at:
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Message Archive:
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Thank you for your continued support of Nonvisual Desktop Access, an open 
source free screen reader for Microsoft Windows:
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To get the latest NVDA snapshot:
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Report bugs or make feature requests at:
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Message Archive:
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