Re: A Bit of a Strange Situation
I use orca very little but find the command line a better choice. I
have to use g.u.i. at work and it's nice to come home and not also have
to do that at home too.
Linux and Apple so far are the only two alternatives that ever got
accessibility mostly right. Windows 3.11 could be installed using a
screen reader under pcdos or msdos but Microsoft broke that capability
as fast as it could; I don't regard any operating system I can't
reinstall myself if necessary as being ready for my home use because of
that huge accessibility deficiency. I installed Tiger on my Mac Mini by
myself and went all the way up to Snow Leopard before the Mini died
permanently last week. I've installed Linux more than once by myself.
I've never been able to install windows in a bare metal scenario with
the screen reader working. Once I managed to install windows using a
sheet of brailled instructions and listening for when the cd drive
stopped spinning to do each instruction, but nobody regards that as
accessible these days.
On Thu, 25 Aug 2011, Scott Ferguson wrote:
> On 25/08/11 20:01, Jude DaShiell wrote:
> > pdf has accessibility issues for screen reader users
>
> Some pdfs have issues.
> Some of the pdf issues are accessibility. :-)
> Some html files also have accessibility issues...
>
> > and riverwind and me are both screen reader users.
>
> And you are not alone.
>
> > The best we can attempt is a text extraction from pdf files if we're
> > going to read what's in them.
>
> Then you have been sadly misinformed.
> I have no problems reading the pdf I linked with Ocular (using kttsd) -
> I prefer the html version, but I wouldn't want it as a single file.
>
> I'd recommend careful preparation (food, drink, sleeping bag etc) before
> attempting to screen read a single page documents made from 544 pages -
> or spend the next few hours trying to kill speech-dispatch (without the
> benefit of a reader) to find it's PID! ;-D
>
> > If what was left in the file was a scanned image, maybe that can be
> > scanned on Windows I don't know that parallel capability exists with
> > Linux yet.
>
> Usually the other way around. Eg. one day Windoof will have
> screenreading built-in to the core and people will stop forking out big
> dollars thinking JAWS is "assistive technology".
>
> Tesseract does an excellent job of OCRing pdfs that are just image -
> there are GUI options.
>
> > Also, whenever text extraction gets done on pdf files with command
> > line tools with Linux there are spelling mistakes in the output.
>
> I'm assuming you use Orca (or whatever Gnome calls it's reader) - surely
> that works with the Gnome PDF viewer?
>
> > The pdf format is just something those of us that can't see the
> > screen would be really happy if either Adobe had never come into
> > existence or invented that format.
>
> If Microsoft ceased to exist I'd agree - but they do, and the best I can
> do with some "users" is get them to send me a pdf *instead* of a
> "rent-a-view" Office document or some other proprietary method of making
> information asymmetrically accessible.... It's a less than perfect world
> so I accept less than perfect solutions.
>
> > Also, knowledgeable sighted
> > technical people I talk with hate Adobe and pdf with a passion and
> > they can't all be wrong.
>
> Originally Adobe *was* pdf. This is no longer the case - it was made an
> open standard three years ago (ISO 32000-1:2008).
>
> Plain text is good, RTF is nice, HTML is better.
> Sadly, many people have problems with cross-platform text files, and
> HTML is often made ugly and unusable, PDFs can be ugly too - but most
> people have no problems viewing or printing them. So often pdfs are
> often the "least worst" format for styled text and image documents. It's
> also a handy format for saving reference webpages.
>
> >
> > On Thu, 25 Aug 2011, Curt wrote:
> >
> <snipped>
> >
> >
>
> Cheers
>
>
Jude <jdashiel@shellworld.net>
"I love the Pope, I love seeing him in his Pope-Mobile, his three feet
of bullet proof plexi-glass. That's faith in action folks! You know he's
got God on his side."
~ Bill Hicks
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