Hi Jamal I am coming late to this discussion. Do folks have the option of using Open office on Linux? I would suggest a couple boring data processing tasks: 1. Everyone gets a comma delimited file of say 80,000 addresses, has to zort on a couple fields and do a mail merge / output customer letters with the address and a couple merge fields such as bill amount or number of days past due or... 2. pick the big giant text file of choice. The file should be formatted for some kind of standard output, all occurrences of all forms of 5-10 terms should be tagged and an index (in the page numbers sense, not the database sense) of the document should be generated after the document is formatted for output. Then then index should be adjusted for a different fomr of output, Braille, large print.... Track the CPU time / resources and also the clock time to do these tasks. The idea is a couple real-life tasks and the battle of the operating systems aspect is how well do the tools facilitate ease of doing these. Best wishes. Dorene Cornwell Seattle WA On Wed, Mar 5, 2008 at 2:37 PM, Jamal Mazrui <empower@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > I am moderating an event called Dueling Operating Systems at the CSUN > conference next week. Three users of an operating system and screen > reader > combination will compete for a couple hours: Windows with JAWS, the > Mac with VoiceOver, and Gnome/Unix with Orca. > > We agreed to develop a long list of possible tasks that would each take > from about 3 to 5 minutes using software that comes with the operating > system, except for JAWS and Microsoft Office. Either I or others I enlist > would pick a selection of tasks from the list at the actual event. > Each task should be described in a general enough way so that someone can > choose the application and screen reader techniques that achieve the same > result. > > If anyone has suggestions about possible tasks to include on the list, I > welcome such input. > > Jamal > > __________ > View the list's information and change your settings at > //www.freelists.org/list/programmingblind > >